Mead @ MindSay

1 Gallon Batches of Mead -

Home Brewing is an interesting little hobby for several reasons. First off it's not too hard to learn how to do it and secondly you end up with a wonderful product you can share with your friends and family. But it can be a bit intensive and a bit expensive to get started.

A great alternative to brewing up an enormous 5 gallon jug of honey wine mead (which makes around 25 bottles of wine) you can just brew up a single gallon. It is less expensive, much easier to do and it will give you about 4 bottles of wine.

Here are three batches of wine that I have brewed. You can see the difference in the color because they are from left to right) a dry mead, a medium mead and a sweet mead. The most important difference in the three is the amount of honey used. The darker the must the more honey that has been added.

 

 

Here are the ingredients and materials you need to brew up your first one gallon batch of mead.

If this is your first time brewing honey wine it will take you less than two hours to complete.

 

 

Materials and Ingredients list:

Some Notes about the materials

About the honey

Clover honey works very well but you can use almost any type of unprocessed honey and the amount of honey you use will determine the sweetness of the mead. If you want to make a dry mead you would use 2 pounds of honey and if you want to make a sweet mead you would use about 3.8 pounds of honey. For simplicity sake we are using 3 pounds of honey which will make us a medium to sweet mead.

About the airlock

The airlock and stopper is a very important part of the process of mead making. You cannot just make a gallon of mead and put a stopper on the top. The mead will ferment and this means that it will create a lot of gases. These gases will quickly build up and if you have your container stopped the pressure will either blow off the stopper or explode the jug outright. Literally you can end up with a mead grenade here. There will be glass and honey water everywhere. So, use an airlock. It allows the gases to escape and keeps impurities out of your mead. The picture shown here is of an airlock, solid stopper and bored stopper.

This picture shows the airlock in place on top of the bottle of mead. The rubber stopper that is solid you will use when you are mixing the must. You mix honey and water together, put the solid stopper on it then shake it up.

 

 

 

 

About the Nutrient and Energizer

I recommend you buy professional nutrient and energizer and they only cost around five bucks per container and each container will last for many many batches of mead. This use of energizer will insure your ferment goes well, healthy and fast. You can use other materials such as orange peels or tea leaves and I will talk a bit about this in future articles.

The Yeast

I recently made three batches of 1 gallon mead. (shown in the pic) ranging from dry to sweet and I used two different yeasts. For the dry yeast I used a yeast called Premier Cuvee and for the medium and sweet batches I used Lalvin D-47. I recommend you make a medium to medium sweet mead and use Lalvin D-47. It is very hardy and almost foolproof.

Where to order these materials?

I recommend you use a company called E.C.Kraus. They have a great selection of products at great prices and their shipping is flawless and fast. I have ordered many things from them and I am very satisfied with their service, price and selection. E.C. Kraus

Let's Get Started and Make our Honey Wine

Put about 1/3 to 1/2 gallon of spring water into your 1 gallon glass carboy and then add your three pounds of honey.

Now add the Energizer and Nutrient

Pour two cups of spring water into your glass mixing bowl and add 2/5 of a tbsp of energizer and 2/5 of a tbsp of nutrient to it. Stir it up well and add it to the honey and water mix.

 

 

 

Put the solid rubber stopper on the bottle and shake the mead mix gently to get it homogenous.

 

 

 

 

 

Now Let's Activate our D-47 Lalvin Yeast

Heat two cups of spring water on the stove to between 104 and 109 degrees fahrenheit. This is warm and not hot. If this water gets too hot you will kill the yeast.

Clean your mixing bowl while you are waiting for the water to heat. Then when the temp of the water is right pour it in your mixing bowl then pour 1/5 of a package of yeast into the water. Do not stir it yet. Just pour it in and wait 15 minutes. When the 15 minutes is up give it a gentle stir so everything is homogenous then pour it right into your jug of honey water.

Now add more spring water to the jug until it is full. You will have left over spring water because the honey has taken up some space in the jug of course. It should be 1 gallon when it looks about like this picture here. To make sure of where the one gallon full mark was I had originally poured a full gallon of spring water in the jug and made a mark with a marker. Just so I could be sure of what the one gallon mark was. Now I just filled to that mark.

Put the rubber stopper on your bottle and shake it vigorously for five full minutes. And at intervals take the cork off to let it breathe then continue shaking. It is important to shake it well for five full minutes because this aerates the must. This aeration is important for the growth of the yeast.

Fill the airlock about half full of water, put it through the rubber stopper then put it firmly on the bottle.

 

 

 

 

 

That's It! You are done

Check on it tomorrow and the day after. It should start bubbling nicely as the yeast comes alive and starts processing the honey into wine.

Now set the bottle aside in a cool and dark place for at least two to three months then you can enjoy your mead!

Okay, next time I decide to fly across the country, remind me not to breathe.  My "cold" has evolved into a nasty sinus infection.  I hate sinus infections, and I get them a lot, unfortunately.  They often evolve into bronchitis, too.  I've felt like crap for several days, now.

 

Of course, this ill health wasn't enough to prevent me from having the fun weekend I'd planned.

 

Friday night, Lilith and I finally had our much-anticipated mead tasting night. She arrived around eight and for the next six hours, we sampled four melomels (that's a fruit-flavored mead): blackberry, cherry, cranberry, and elderberry.  The cherry was my favorite, suprisingly, as I'd expected blackberry to "win."  Either way, they were all good, but the tasting was entirely secondary to the conversation.  It's been a long time since I've had a six-hour conversation with anyone, and it was fantastic. 

 

I'm really hoping we'll be able to spend more time together.  She's invited me to spend Thanksgiving with her family.  Evidently, they go to a cabin somewhere for the holiday.  Not sure I want to meet a dozen people for the first time on an overnight trip, though.

 

In turn, I asked her if she wanted to go to Tahoe with me for my book signing on the 18th.  She's tentatively said yes, and is checking her calendar.

 

Saturday, I didn't do much of anything.  I was pretty wiped out from my late night on Friday, so I just vegetated.  But Sunday was D&D at my place.  As usual, Porsha flaked on us.  And Steve spaced, too, thinking for some reason that it was next weekend.  But we had a new player, another of Kassi's friends.  This one, however, is far, far less annoying than her last one (the one who moved to Tennessee).  It was her first time playing, and she really seemed to enjoy it, so I guess we'll be seeing more of her, including this coming Sunday.

 

But my day of fighting dragons drained me, too.  Yesterday I left work at noon and crashed at home for a two and a half hour nap.  I'm feeling a little better today, but my improvement has been far too slow.  So I'll be picking up some antibiotics after work today.  I'd rather not have to, but such is life.

 

And I need to feel better, soon.  I'm teaching this Thursday night.  And in addition to Sunday's D&D, The Kimberly Trip is playing at Old Ironsides on Saturday.  No damn sinus infection is gonna stop me from going to see them.

 

I'm writing this in connection to my previous entry, so if you read this and don't "Get it" then go back one and start there.

 

When considering the actual process of creating one thing from another, one has to realize that we are not actually doing the creating.  We are simply allowing forms of life essentially beyond our control to help us achieve our ends.

I spoke previously about "critical mass."  This term is used in various different ways to describe a state which is achieved by a group.  In physics, this may refer to a population of atoms in relation to a reaction (fission, for example).  In fermentation, or winemaking, critical mass describes the state of the yeasts when they are acting in harmony to produce the most ethanol at once during the process. 

In other words, the crowd at the concert is all cheering at once.

 

In order to reliably achieve critical mass and, therefore, make wine, mead, beer, etc, there needs to be enough volume for a diverse and sustained population of yeasts to survive.  If you try to brew a beer in a pint glass, the yeast will starve and the contents will be overtaken by other decomposers such as fungi or moulds.

 

Purity.

In this context, "purity" will refer not to the level of filtration, but the degree to which your medium is natural. 

Ingredients with unnatural origins will hamper the efficiency of your ferment. 

Many store-bought products contain preservatives - added specifically to discourage the growth of yeasts and other life.  Preservatives are only useful if the food is not to be sold fresh. 

 

Your ferment does not need preservatives to survive. 

When it comes to storage, conscientious practices will assure clean canning/jarring/bottling. 

 

Gear.

The useful tools you may need to produce a fermented product can be many or few.

 

The first thing I would recommend is a "crock" - a  food-grade ceramic/clay jar with straight sides (and no cracks or chips).  Typically, crocks have their volume notated on the sides or on the bottom.  The smallest crock I have is a one gallon, the largest is a three.  You will probably not need a larger crock until you have been brewing/pickling/etc for a while.  A two-thirds full three gallon crock is probably about all you want to try and lift, anyway.  Not much could be worse than spilling your whole batch of mead (potentially breaking your crock, ruining a carpet, etc) in addition to wasting a month or more of energy.

 

Some other useful bits and bobs are:

A wooden or plastic slotted spoon (and a solid one, for tasting).

A 3 to 5 foot length of surgical tubing (unused) for siphoning.

A glass or plastic measuring cup.

A few yards of cheesecloth/muslin for covering your work against wee beasties.

A few gallon jars for decanting and aging (you can buy organic apple juice or cider in gallon jars in the US)

    (Try opening the gallon jug of cider and covering the top with a little cheesecloth or a clean kitchen towel.

     Wait three weeks or so and taste for a simple hard cider.)

Airlocks - these can be bought at a brewery supplies store, and usually cost about a dollar.  VERY useful for aging mead or other wines and ciders.  Make sure you get the right size for your bottle.

 

 

 

Well, it was an interesting weekend, to put it mildly.

 

Friday night, I went up to The Corner Pocket in Citrus Heights to hang out with Debbie for a bit.  Later in the evening, her husband showed up, so we talked for a while.  This was nice, as I haven't seen him since Lorelei was out here visiting.

 

One thing I like a lot about The Pocket is that the employees are (mostly) really nice.  And they’ve got lots of pool tables, though I rarely play there.  My biggest complaint about the place is that the music is too loud, and usually shitty.  More often than not, it seems like the employees are the ones feeding money into the jukebox, and so there’s lots of distortion-heavy rock that takes little talent and all sounds the same.  Not even really good heavy rock, mind you, but stuff that’ll be forgotten in five years.  (Yes, I know that’s subjective.)

 

Kim (not sure of her status there… manager?... owner’s girlfriend?) and I talked about beer.  We clearly have different tastes.  I mentioned that their selection of draft brews was just awful.  It’s the standard Coors, Miller, Anheuser-Busch crap, plus a hefeweizen, Guinness, Fat Tire, and Coors’ Blue Moon.  I might be forgetting something, but that's the gist of it.  And of those, the only one I’ll drink is Guinness.  Now, they do have one tap that rotates.  Not long ago, it was Skinny Dip, from New Belgium, the makers of Fat Tire.  (I find Fat Tire way overrated, honestly.  It’s not bad, but not something I’d choose from a given list.)  Kim thought the Skinny Dip tasted like ass.  I rather liked it.  And on the flip side, currently the tap is being used for something else… I’ve forgotten the name.  She loves it.  I think it tastes very much like Samuel Adams’ Boston Lager, which is probably my least favorite S.A. offering.  I suggested pretty much anything from Lost Coast brewery, and she mentioned that they used to carry their Downtown Brown.  Used to???  Why on earth would you stop carrying that?  That’s an awesome beer.  Their Great White is very good, too.  (Though my favorite is their Raspberry Brown.)  At any rate, I don’t expect to see anything there from Lost Coast, or anything really good.

 

 

Instead of going straight home afterwards, I went grocery shopping.  I like the fact that there are no crowds at Safeway at midnight, but the shelf stockers really should be more considerate of customers.  Three times, aisles were totally blocked by them and their wares.  Customers shouldn’t have to ask them to move their stuff in order to pass by, in my opinion.  This is just another example of what I see as a deterioration of customer service in all sectors.

 

After getting home, I played City of Heroes for a while and didn’t go to bed until about four in the morning.  (Yes, I find that just as pathetic as you do.)

 

Despite this, I got up before noon on Saturday and ran some errands.  One of these took me to BevMo.  And no… I didn’t get out of there spending less than $75.  What is it about that place???  The lame thing is I didn’t even go there to buy any alcohol.  I just needed some additional bottle stoppers, and didn’t feel like paying five bucks each (or more) for the fancy schmancy ones at Target.  I have a few, but they’re already in use.  At some point, Lilith and I will have our mead sampling night.  And since I don’t expect us to drink four bottles of mead between us, it might be nice to be able to cork ‘em back up.

 

Yes, I did finally hear back from her on the no-show from last weekend.  Seems she was involved in a freak household accident not long after we talked.  I won’t go into detail, but it involved a snagged skirt, a child’s wooden alphabet letter, bare feet, and a fickle futon frame.  Oh, and lots of pain.  The rest is for your imagination.

 

 

Speaking of Lilith, she was a living canvas during Second Saturday.  Her friend, Kevin Mason, is an artist who paints people.  And I don’t mean portraits.  You may have seen work like his before… he’ll paint a backdrop on canvas, then paint a person’s nude body to blend right into it.  Take a look at his work over at http://www.thepaintedbody.com.  Saturday, he was at the Smith Gallery on 11^th Street, and as you might imagine, the novelty of watching a naked person being painted brought in quite a crowd.

 

For this session, Lilith was painted completely black.  Well, truthfully, he doesn't use paint.  He uses theatrical makeup.  Much less hazardous.  So she was completely black, and on this he painted silver stars, a comet, etc.  She was against a similar black, starry backdrop, which also had planets.  Eventually, he blended her into one of the planets by painting rings on her and positioning her just-so.  It was very cool.

 

At one point, I was speaking with Kevin’s wife, and I jokingly said, “So if someone wanted to buy the original, do they just get to hang her on their wall?”  Instead of laughing, she yells across the room, “Hey, Lilith…  Cardigan wants the original, so you’re going home with him tonight!”  Lilith just smiled and winked at me.  Then she said, “Hey, you signed my books… I’m already your bitch.”

 

Um, okay.

 

Speaking of books… Kevin’s going to paint my book covers on the backs of Lilith and his wife, and they’re going to parade around the State Fair during my appearance there.  Way cool!

 

 

Before the show, I’d gone over to Temple Coffee for an iced latte.  It was nearly 100 degrees, still, by evening, and I was parched after the walk from my apartment.  So I lounged there for a bit, and found myself thinking the girl behind the counter was cute.  And then I checked myself.  Dammit!  ladyluck  was right!  I do have a thing for baristas!

 

Cybergal and a friend of hers were also at the show (she took the photos that will later be sold and posted online), and at one point wanted a coffee.  I directed them over to Temple, and they really liked it.  Temple’s on 10^th & K, in case you’re local. 

 

I went back there after the show, too, and this time got a hot beverage.  Awesome.  Possibly the best coffee drink I’ve had downtown.  Some of the other patrons of Kevin’s show were there, and I got to talking with them.  One of them was a kid (actually 20, but looked like a brown-haired, 16-year old Corey Feldman) who was drinking tea.  He was sitting near me, and we talked about tea.  Then he brought up wine… and I neither like wine nor know much of anything about it.

 

At one point, he’d mentioned going to conferences.  When he mentioned them a second time, I said, “Sorry, what kind of conferences are we talking about?”  He paused, then, as though he didn’t want to tell me.  (Of course, you don’t mention conferences, even in the abstract, unless you actually do want to talk about them.)  He demurred a bit, saying that I’d probably never heard of them.  Mentioned some initials that meant nothing to me.  Now, in my head, a thought was forming.  At first, I thought he was going to mention “the lifestyle,” as swingers call it.  But no… I didn’t get that vibe.  As a poly person, I’m used to being cautious about mentioning my own lifestyle to people, but I was getting an even weirder vibe from this kid.  No, I thought.  Don’t tell me he’s into…

 

“Furries.”

 

To my credit, I kept a straight face, and nodded.  If you have no idea what he meant by “Furries,” look it up.  I’m not going to spell it out for you.

 

“The media always focuses on the really weird and unpleasant members of our society,” he said.  And I was thinking, “What is the non-weird side of that?”  He also claimed that 20% of our society are Furries.  I wanted to say, “Oh, bullshit.”  But I tactfully said, “Uhh… really?  That seems pretty high to me.” 

 

“Well,” he said, “I might be exaggerating a little, but I know it’s more than 10%.”

 

Again, bullshit.  But whatever.

 

Let’s just say I’m glad he and his party left not long thereafter, because I didn’t really like the direction this conversation was heading.

 

 

Sunday morning, I went to the poly coffee meeting in Davis.  There were five of us.  Conversation revolved quite a lot around guitars and shoes.  Don't ask me why.

 

Afterward, I didn’t do much of anything.  Honestly, my day went rapidly downhill.  I was feeling very despondent over my job, and overwhelmed by the difficulty of a career transition.  But as bad a day as I was having, Lorelei was having a worse one.

 

She called and we talked for about ten minutes.  And I realized that this couldn’t be one of our standard talks.  Talking to her as a friend (or ex-husband) wasn’t going to help her.  So I decided I needed to walk the talk.  I needed to talk to her as I would to a coaching client.

 

Two hours of talking later, she felt like she was in a bit of a better place, though it’s just as likely to have been the Xanax.  However, a few hours later, she called back, and it was like I was talking to a different person.  Something, I guess, really clicked.  She started talking about how she was now looking at things, and it was like she’d undergone a radical shift in her thinking. (This was one of the main things we'd talked about - changing how things affect us simply by looking at them in a different way.)

 

She said the “coaching session” really had helped her, and that she could definitely see me doing this for a living.

 

After that, well... my day wasn’t quite so bad.

 

Ahh...  Four days out of the office.  Talk about nice.

My weekend proper was way cool.  Saturday was D&D, down to only three players at this point because Sam moved out of state the day before.  (However, I've recruited two more players for our next session.)  It was a good game, running from noon until eight.  Didn't do much with the rest of my day.

Sunday I was over at Lilith's place for a few hours.  (She's one of the above-mentioned recruits, along with a friend of hers whom I met that day.)  They were having a BBQ, and though I left before that got into full swing, she and I did have a chance to talk quite a bit.

I gave her a bottle of blackberry mead I purchased for her.  I've got a bottle, myself, which I haven't opened, yet.  Also a bottle each of cherry, cranberry, and elderberry mead.  So this evening, after my interview, we're either having a mead (technically, melomel) sampling night, or we're going out for tea.  Not sure which.

Interview???  Yes, interview.  But not for a paying gig.  I'm being interviewed for a prospective position as a volunteer on a suicide crisis hotline.  If I'm chosen, I'll undergo 50 hours of training and am essentially promising them (if memory serves) 4 hours a week of service for a year.  I've been thinking of doing some sort of volunteer work for a while, now, and this seems like such a logical choice, given my intentions of changing careers.  So we'll see how it goes.  It's interesting, though... I've already encountered two other people who did this, at one time in their lives... Lilith being one of them.  They've told me it's amazingly stressful, but also incredibly rewarding.  I expected nothing else.


Tomorrow is Independence Day, and I plan to do absolutely nothing.  I'm broke, so I can't really go spend money.  Like today, I'll probably just continue with my life coaching module, maybe play some guitar, and generally unwind before having to go back to the orifice on Wednesday.

The 4th of July is a huge event in my home town.  As a kid, I really ate it up.  It was awesome. I mean, sure... most of the stuff wasn't interesting to me, but there was plenty to keep me occupied.  There was an antique car show.  Games.  Music.  A water battle... and this was my favorite... in which they would string an empty beer keg on a wire in the middle of main street, and two teams of firefighters would spray it with the hoses, in a sort of "push of war" to get it to the other team's side.  If you stood close enough, you got soaked!  Way fun.  And of course, the obligatory parade and awesome fireworks.

The fireworks... I gotta tell ya...  were really something.  For a small town (2200 people), they really did it up big.  People came from all over northwestern PA to see these.  And the cool thing was, they were set off only a couple hundred yards from my house!  Right across the street from where I grew up ran a creek.  It had large flood control dikes, and on the other side of that was our high school's football field.  That's where they set them off.  (Back then; not now.)  So I'd just walk across the street and stake out some real estate on top of the dike, lie down, and watch them.  You were so close to them, you could literally feel the concussion as they exploded in the sky.  Amazing.

As a teen, I grew to detest the parade, and still do.  I hate parades.  Passionately.  Still love fireworks, though.  And I find myself missing the water battle, too, even though as an adult I find it a bit silly.

Even though it doesn't retain the charm for me it once did, our "Old Fashioned Fourth" celebration will always be one of my fondest memories about my home town.