Mead Bottling Day - Making Mead

G'day again. No update on the goop today. It's still goop in a jar beside my coffee pot. I fed it, I stirred it, it gets old. So today let's play with some mead.

It's my day off and I've been procrastinating on finishing my mead for a good month now so I figure today is as good a day as any. I made this particular mead (and recipe) for my friend Brian. Since I'm a few months behind my timeline I'm sure he'll be more than happy to take it off my hands once I finish bottling it.

Anyway, while I'm bottling my mead, here's how you can make your own. I know this is off topic, but hey, get used to it. Besides, mead and bread go great together. You can drink mead with bread or just dump the mead right into the goop (Boil off the alcohol and let it cool first). Mmmm.

In typical me fashion I have a recipe for this that I don't ever follow so here's a "best guess" as to what I threw into the mix based on remnants of ingredients I found leftover and what I kind of remember there being.

Equipment you need:
• Primary Fermentor (Big bucket that holds 6ish gallons and has a lid)
• 2 Secondary Fermentors with airlocks (Get "better bottles" from a wine making shop.)
• Siphon Hose (Don't use the same one you use to steal gas.)
• Big Spoon (Like 3 feet long, or anything you can stir a full bucket with)
• Wine Filter (Optional, but you can rent them cheap.)

You can always get the equipment on sale at your local wine making shop.  Usually they will sell you everything you need bundled together with a kit of wine at a super low price just so that you will keep coming back to buy more wine kits.  If it isn't on sale when you go, find a new wine shop.  The one you're at is an overpriced haven for hipsters and a den of evil.

Ingredients:
• 7 kg Bucket of Honey.  Go to a farmers market if you can.  Its cheaper and you want the tastiest honey you can find.  None of that crap from the plastic bear.  A good honey is the most important ingredient, spend some money and get the good stuff.  7 kg works out to about 1 1/2 large ice cream pails worth.  Don't have enough? Add some sugar.  Too much? have a sandwich with it and dump the rest in. You don't need to be exact here.  Just remember what you did for the next time so you can adjust it to your taste.
• 5 Gallons Warm Water (I use a water cooler jug, boil one pot and add it back)
• 1 Jug of Apple Juice (The kind without preservatives). 

Make sure the juice, the water and the honey fit into the bucket.  Remove some water if you need room.

• 1 to 500 Cinnamon Sticks
• Cloves (mine doesn't get cloves, I'm allergic, but they make it better)

And some cracked out chemicals:
• 25 Tsp Acid Blend (I bet there's math here, but really, they sell you a huge bag. You may as well use it all, how often do you need this stuff.)
• 1 1/4 Tsp Wine Tannin
• 5 Tsp Yeast Nutrient (I probably used more but this is based on some "Nick" math and the original recipe)
• 5 or 6 Campden Tablets (1 per gallon, crush em)
• Optional: Baggie of Wine Yeast (Ask the guy at the store what kind you want, he's smarter than me and yeast is a snooty business).  You can just let your mix ferment naturally without adding yeast but its riskier and with the time frame involved on mead I tend to like to guarantee success.  If you are feeling really brave, throw some sourdough starter in there and let me know what happens.
• Optional: 3 Tsp Bentonite (What is Bentonite? Dirt.)  Do NOT cheap out here and just use dirt.  Dirt experts make Bentonite and the stuff is dirt cheap anyway.  Stir it in at the start and it will help clear out some of the crud from your mix.  Try and leave all the Bentonite stuck to the bottom of your bucket when you syphon the first time.  As an added bonus you can eat your left over Bentonite. Yup, people do it.  Little bit o' dirt makes ya healthy they say.

All the cracked out chemical ingredients are like a dollar at your local wine making shop. Bring the recipe and look like a deer in headlights, they will hook you up after mocking you for even attempting to make mead.  As an added bonus most of these chemicals come in little vials and baggies.  When you get some water boiling and your mixture into your bucket it really helps add to that mad scientist/crazy witch motif when you've got random vials of stuff to throw in.  Make sure to laugh maniacally/cackle as you stir.

Right, now that you have all your ingredients and the guy at the wine store had ample time to mock you while you gazed in wonder at all the shiny toys you really need to buy we are ready to go. Technically what we are making is a mix between a cyser and metheglin, not actually mead. Well, unless you consider those mead. The Vikings will probably come to kill you for bastardizing their drink either way. Anyway, my brain says honey + water/booze = mead and no Vikings yet.

Instructions:
• You want your honey to be pourable so heat it if you have to.  I microwaved mine for like 10 minutes because I couldnt even get a knife in it to get it out of its bucket.  I'd imagine classier people probably do something with a double boiler.
• Mix everything except the yeast and the campden tablets into the warm water that's in your bucket.
• Wait for the mixture to cool to around room temperature.
• Add yeast (be sure it's not too hot when you do this, yeast goes retarded when it's hot and makes little retarded yeast babies. We care about the intelligence of our yeast.  Different yeast will have different "too hot" points, so ask when you are buying it.)
• Depending on what side of the fence you sit on, you can stir or not stir. Shakespeare doesn't care. I stir the yeast in.
• Put lid on bucket.
• Walk away for a week. If you have OCD you can stir the mix a few times a day.

Dump a bunch of goop into a bucket and stir it for a week, where have I heard these instructions before...

• Siphon the mix into a secondary fermentor, try and splash it around some when it goes in. Splashing it all over helps to get rid of some of the carbonation.  Leave out the disgusting goop at the bottom when you are Siphoning.
• Stir the ever-loving crap out of it till your arms fall off and you want to cry.
• Put the airlock on and walk away.
• Wait three weeks.
• Siphon it into the other bottle. Stir the ever loving crap out of it. Attach the airlock and walk away.
• Wait three months.
• Add the crushed up campden tablets and stir them in until they are dissolved.
• "Rack" your mead. No no, put the ropes away. Just siphon your mix into the other bottle. Try not to splash it around and don't stir it.
• Rack it every three months or so.
• It's good to bottle when it turns clear. I've never seen it turn clear myself so I think this is a myth. But hey, all the recipes say so. Whatever, mine turns like the picture. Usually you are good to go after about a year. It's not going to mind if you wait a little longer.
• Optional Nick approved step. Since I primarily make this to laugh at my rampant alcoholic friends I usually dump in a bottle of everclear before I bottle it. Rum tastes nice too. If you aren't a rampant alcoholic feel free to skip this step, but hey, if you have some laying around.
• Siphon it into bottles so you can store it and drink it later. Or don't. I put mine into brown pop bottles for stylish redneck points. They sell them at every wine making store.
• Wait a few months after it gets bottled before you drink it.

Nicks Notes:
• Whenever you are making your own alcohol make sure everything is sterilized before you use it.  Every time, no exceptions.  This is extra true for mead.  Mead takes a year.  If you screw it up on the first day, it takes a year for you to know. A year.  Don't mess around here.  This isn't goop in a mason jar that you can throw out after a few days if it doesn't work.
• When you aren't playing with the mead keep it in cool dark place. Booze is like vampires really, the dissolving and turning into crap in the sun kind. Not the sparkly kind. Though sparkly booze is good too. OK, back on topic now.
• Don't drink it before its good and ready (like when you are siphoning it). It will knock you on your, err, duff and make you puke all over your floor. Trust me, I'm an idiot, we know these things.
• I think with everything together (including equipment and a wine kit) my start up costs for this project were right around $110. When you consider that you get 6 gallons of mead out of the deal and after the first time the equipment is free it turns out to be fairly affordable.
• When you go to bottle the last time it isn't a bad idea to rent a wine filter (or buy one if you are going to do this a few times). Depending how thick your mead is the filter can turn into a real mess though. I had to replace my pads three or four times the first time I made mead. The second batch all went through on one set of pads. Other people "cold filter" mead. I'm lazy and that looked like work.
• Once your mead is done you can freeze some and collect the liquid that doesn't freeze. It's a nice liqueur (and it has a snooty name too, but I don't remember it). It's crazy sweet and I don't personally like it, but, other people swear by the stuff. So give it a try. It's not like there's going to be a shortage of mead once you're done, you may as well play with some.
• You can of course replace the apple juice and spices with anything else that you want as long as there are no preservatives in it.  Or just leave them out entirely for purist mead.  Just remember that whatever juice you add is going to ferment so make sure you like ~fill in the blank~ cider if it's going into the bucket.  If you are just going to add cider be sure to boil off the alcohol so it doesn't kill your yeast.  Or just add the cider at the end (with the everclear).