1. Creating Your Own Wild-Fermented Mead

DIY Mead Webinar with Jereme Zimmerman was recorded live on Wednesday, April 29, 2020. Approx. 1 h 31 m.

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

Jereme Zimmerman: My first book, which is what this presentation is about, is Make Mead Like a Viking, published by Chelsea Green. I also have a book, Brew Beer Like a Yeti. I’m the Redheaded Yeti is my nickname. Hopefully I’ll be doing some webinars and some videos on that book later, doing some more beer stuff. But for now, we’re gonna go ahead and jump into some mead saying And when I first kinda came up with this idea, I’d been brewing beer for a while, I’d been making mead.

[00:00:38] And once I really started getting into mead, I also came across it a lot in historical texts I was reading both literature and actual history, but also Norse sagas and poetry and stuff like that, and mead showed up a lot. And it also shows up in a lot of medieval texts. So [00:01:00] I got to thinking, if people were making it way back then I do see a Q&A pop up, so I’m gonna go ahead and look at that real quick.

[00:01:10] Okay, there are some questions popping up. I’ll check with those. I might not check with them all while I’m doing this presentation, but I’m just getting used to this whole setup now, and I do see that I can make note when there are questions. So for now, I’m gonna go through this presentation, and then I’ll pop that out there and I’ll, and answer some questions about all this.

[00:01:27] And hopefully some of your questions will get answered in this presentation. But essentially, what I got into was my… When I was brewing beer, I was making beer kits. I’d go to a home brew store. I’d buy a bunch of stuff, just like making a, a cake from a box kind of a thing.

[00:01:43] It was already there and so I mixed everything, made some good beer that way. And then I realized that people were not doing that even 100 years ago or so. So mead was a good place to start with that because mead is a very simple beverage. Honey plus water plus yeast, [00:02:00] mix them all together, get the right environment going, they ferment, start turning into alcohol, you’ve got mead.

[00:02:07] There’s more to it than that if you wanna age it and flavor it with all different kinds of things, but it’s very simple. To make any kind of alcohol, all you need is a fermentable sugar. With mead, it’s honey, which is why that’s very likely the first alcoholic beverage anybody ever discovered because raw honey straight from the hive has all kinds of nutrients and stuff in it, and pollen and whatnot that the bees have brought in.

[00:02:32] And in the air around us, pretty much anywhere you are there’s wild yeast in the air. So raw honey at least will ferment naturally on its own. I’ll talk about some things we can do to help that along. But that was the simplest thing to start with. Beer involves a few more things.

[00:02:49] I’m not gonna go into beer in this presentation, but the beer that people are accustomed to is made with malted grains become… Are the source of the sugar, and there’s a kind of a cooking [00:03:00] process. There’s a, a lot more involved to drawing the sugars out. Mead is easy. Honey, water, and yeast. The bees have done most of the work for us.

[00:03:07] There are a lot of flavoring possibilities. I’ll get into that. But one of my interests initially was in Norse mythology. It shows up a lot as basically the drink of the gods. The Norse poets, called skalds, would Kind of drank mead, possibly very likely with some psychotropic ingredients in it to bring themself to a state where they could produce this epic poetry about the gods and that sort of thing.

[00:03:36] So that is completely up to you if you wanna do that kind of thing. But most of us these days just want it to have a little glass of it to drink like a wine. A lot of it’s very similar to wine. You can make meads that are more like beers. Drink them out of a horn if you happen to make your own drinking horns like I do, or you can buy a lot of them online.

[00:03:57] There’s all different ways you can do it, either from [00:04:00] drinking it, making it like a viking to more of a modern or sophisticated drinker sort of thing. So the types of mead. The pl- the best place to start is the fact that it can go from dry to semi-sweet to sweet. Just because it’s made from honey doesn’t mean that it has to be sweet.

[00:04:22] It’s just like wine or beer or cider or anything else. There’s all different kinds of flavor possibilities, not just from what you can add to it, but in the way that it’s made, the amount of sugars that are used that will vary the flavoring quite a bit.

[00:04:40] My mouse is acting a little funky here.

[00:04:49] Yes, I am checking some of the questions from time to time. There’s a question about smallest batch you can make, and that is something I will be getting to here momentarily. But [00:05:00] it can be anywhere from making one pint glass worth of mead to go ahead and ferment and have ready to drink in a week, to a one gallon batch, and I’ll bring that out.

[00:05:10] Much larger. So I’ll be touching on that here in a moment But the other thing that you can do with mead is you can go anywhere from a very basic honey, water, and yeast, which I just call mead. Some people call it show mead, which is a term that was come up with for home brewing competitions.

[00:05:29] Hence the word show, because you’re presenting it as a show, traditional mead is what I like to call it. It’s basically mead. The honey, water, and yeast mead are a little extra something or the other, but I will be talking about the extra ingredients that you’ll need for the basic mead in a moment here So there are all kinds of flavoring ingredients that you can use, all different types of fruit.

[00:05:55] The Name of the mead becomes [00:06:00] different depending on what you add to it, and that really only matters if you’re a mead geek or want to show off in front of a mead geek or whatever. I’m fine with just calling it a fruit mead, but melomel is the term for fruit mead. And there’s a much longer list than that.

[00:06:13] If it’s a cider mead made with mixing honey, water, and apple juice, it’s a cyser. A pyment is a grape mead, basically a wine-mead hybrid. Lots of variations of fruit meads, but kind of the basic designations are show mead or traditional mead, fruit mead. And I’ve got a picture of a, I think it was a peach horehound mead that I had going in there with a heavier horehound in it.

[00:06:36] And speaking of herbs, mead made with herbs, spices, flowers, all that sort of thing, pretty much anything you might grow in your garden or find growing in your yard that’s edible or if you’re a forager, that becomes a metheglin, which comes from the Welsh word med- meddyglyn, which I’m probably mispronouncing, but it basically means medicine.

[00:06:56] So if you’re into herbalism, you want to understand the medicinal [00:07:00] benefits of different types of herbs, you can make a mead intentionally, as was done historically, to, for its medicinal effects It’ll still be tasty, or you can make a really strong one with herbs and spices that might be a little much for you to drink much of, but they’ll really push the benefits of that, that particular plant.

[00:07:22] So there’s different ways of doing it, from drinking to just plain medicine. One thing to keep in mind with herbs, most herbs and spices, especially things like cinnamon, cloves, that kind of stuff bittering herbs like yarrow and mugwort, they don’t need much. A little too much can be a lot too much when it comes to the final product.

[00:07:40] The fermentation flavors do dissipate a little bit once it’s fully fermented, but fermentation itself also increases the properties of the herbs. So you don’t really need a whole lot for the flavoring or for the medicinal benefits. The picture I have down there I just popped up is a chai mead.

[00:07:58] That’s in my book. It’s [00:08:00] basically all the ingredients you would have in a chai tea, it’s in a mead. And I’ve also got a where I’m filtering the flowers out from a wild violet and dandelion petal mead. So you go out this time of the year in your yard, at least here in Kentucky, violets started popping up about a month ago.

[00:08:18] They’ve started to dissipate a little bit now. The dandelions are starting to take over, and there’s other types of plants that’ll grow in your yard that if you Google it, first thing that might come up is somebody like Roundup saying, “This is a horrible weed. Here’s how to kill it.” If you’re watching this, you probably don’t want to do that kind of thing anyway.

[00:08:36] So if you’re not spraying your yard, if you’re picking from a place you know it hasn’t been sprayed, those are all great things to put in mead. Vegetables, mushrooms, peppers. The, the sky’s the limit. If it’s edible, you can make mead out of it. I’ve used shiitake mushrooms that I’ve grown in the yard, made a shiitake garlic mead, which you’ve got down there.

[00:08:56] Little bit of those ingredients, very subtle. It doesn’t taste as [00:09:00] horrible as it sounds. It’s actually quite good, or you can intentionally do a lot. Sometimes I’ll pop a garlic clove in a bottle, and I’ll use that for cooking or if I think I might ha- have some vampires come here or something like that.

[00:09:13] But yeah, flavors like that are really strong, you can do subtle amounts and just get just enough to enjoy drinking it, or you can do a lot. A pepper mead is called a capsicum ale. Same thing with that, I intentionally done way too much. Definitely do not want to drink any of it, or at least not much of it, but it works really well to baste meat in, to deglaze a pan, whatever you need to do my daughter is off screen trying to grab something.

[00:09:41] Careful. Okay, good to go. If you happen to… I am at home now, so we have a small house. Bathroom’s right over there. Kids are taking care of their business. If you happen to see a five-year-old come running through saying, “I need to go potty,” that’s that. We’ll just have to deal with that, so another thing speaking of beer, if you make beer, you can make a [00:10:00] grain-based mead called a brega, or just honey beer. You can use beer in mead, or I’m sorry, honey and beer as well to make kind of a beer mead hybrid. Lots of possibilities. So I talked about fermentation and flavor enhancers. If you’re making a basic mead, a show mead, a traditional mead, just the honey, water, and yeast, it might be a little flat.

[00:10:22] It might just be missing some kind of pizzazz. Sometimes the, the yeast need a little extra to work with to draw out the flavors. Sometimes it’s like you’re dropping a kid in a candy store. They may actually produce some off flavors you don’t like if you don’t have a little bit of something extra.

[00:10:37] So most wine-making and homebrew supply stores, you’ll find things like tannins, acids, and nutrients, which I mostly have because lots of people tend to give me their old wine-making kits, and I have lots of this stuff around I don’t really use. Some of it I do. But things like… See if we can… If you can see that.[00:11:00]

[00:11:00] Where’s the camera? Let’s use that one. So it comes from a natural source, grapes. It’s called tannins We’ve got an acid blend

[00:11:16] and nutrients. And I’ll talk about what all these are. These are all things you can find in natural sources. It’s convenient to have them packaged like that, but you don’t necessarily need to use that. I’m gonna check real quick, see if there’s a question here that is relevant to, On the other camera.

[00:11:32] Okay, so I got my phone camera and my laptop going here. The phone one is actually the better camera, which is probably why somebody’s saying that

[00:11:46] So let’s see. We’ve got

[00:11:51] Hopefully that’ll work a little better. I don’t necessarily need to see ’em, but it doesn’t hurt. Usually I don’t have all of this stuff with me. [00:12:00] But since I’m in my kitchen near all my home brewing stuff, I figured why not?

[00:12:09] And this is a, a wine yeast or nutrient blend, which I do use sometimes, and I’ll talk about what that means. But, helps to see ’em, but really they’re just all different types of powdered substances basically. For citric acid all you really need is lemons or any kind of citric. Grapefruit, orange, any of that kind of stuff will do So what tannins are, basically if, say, a red wine versus a white wine, a red wine gets its color because the skin’s around it.

[00:12:45] The skins also provide that extra kind of mouth feel. So some, some red wines might make you not really pucker up, but almost your taste buds pinch up a little bit when you take a drink. Those [00:13:00] tannins help balance out flavors essentially is what they do. Too much and it’s, definitely too much.

[00:13:09] So you really only need tiny, subtle amounts of all this. My recipes touch upon the amounts of different things that you need, and most other recipes you might find online will do that as well. So natural sources where you can find them. Historically I found a lot of references to people just putting an oak leaf or a walnut leaf just floating on top of the mead or the wine.

[00:13:31] And as far as I can tell, green or later in the season, both of them still pretty much have the same amount, or will do the same effect for tannins. Raisins is another option. I use raisins for various things in my mead. But I just go to the local hunger store. This one’s pretty old, but organic raisins There are various reasons why you might wanna go organic, but mainly this, it doesn’t [00:14:00] have any- anything in there that’s gonna inhibit fermentation.

[00:14:03] It’s just good to have in mead in general. If you go on a lot of mead… Go on the internet, a lot of mead recipes will pretty much, people will say that you don’t wanna use any of that kind of stuff. But from what I’ve researched and talked to people, there’s kind of a divide there. Some people really stick to all the modern stuff and say, “How dare you even try to use any of this natural, historical stuff.”

[00:14:25] And other people do it the natural way all the time, like myself, make perfectly good mead. So just try it out for yourself and decide for yourself, basically. So again, I mentioned acids. You really don’t need a whole lot. I got a lemon here. You’re, really all I would do with this is just pinch a tiny bit, like maybe half a teaspoon for a one gallon batch.

[00:14:51] And again, that kind of acts a bit as a nutrient. It acts as… it provides a little bit of extra balance. Balances out the natural acids [00:15:00] that are already in a lot of honeys

[00:15:05] So I do see a question here about will I be talking about braggot or will that be another, another webinar? Near the end here when I really get into the Q&A, I might… I’ll be able to give a little more detail on that. If you happen to brew beer already and, if that, if you’re coming from that background then yeah, I could probably give you a pretty good idea of how to make braggots.

[00:15:30] But it would involve discussing the entire beer brewing process to really get that down. So not really, but honestly, all a braggot really is you’re making a batch of beer and when you finish doing the whole wort boiling, you do all the cooking part, you just add a bunch of honey to it, and the honey ferments along with the rest of it.

[00:15:53] There’s not much more to it than that at all. It’s just adding a bunch of honey to some beer, which is gonna up the alcohol content and give it its [00:16:00] own kind of flavor

[00:16:04] Not really seeing anything new here, so But I’m gonna pop to another question I do see here though

[00:16:15] So there’s a question about water kefir, and is there sweet mead and dry mead. I touched upon sweet and dry mead a little bit. I will, I’ll go a little more into it when I talk about making an actual batch. But essentially it’s the more honey you put in, number one, the more alcohol it will become, but eventually those yeast just stop eating the sugars, and the leftover honey makes for a sweeter mead.

[00:16:41] I’ll go into a little more detail on how that works. But yeah, it can go anywhere from a really dry to sweet. As far as water kefir, other types of starters, that’s a different type of a ferment. I’ve made water kefir and kombucha myself as well. Those are SCOBYs. Symbiotic community of bacteria and yeast.

[00:16:59] I do know [00:17:00] people who have played around with things like that, even using sauerkraut brine in mead. I haven’t really messed with that myself. There are different types of ferments. You’re gonna have much more of an acidic sort of a, a mead. It’s something you can play around with. It’s just the types of yeast that you’re using for mead are fermenting the sugars into alcohol.

[00:17:22] Water kefir, kombucha, that kind of stuff, it gets s- acidic pretty quick. Once it gets to a certain level of acid, fermentation’s just gonna stop. So there are ways you could creatively blend it. You can make a starter similar to the way you make kefir, but it’s not gonna be the same thing.

[00:17:38] That’s the best I can get at that question for now. And if you wanna ask that again or have some more questions about it, pop it in there and I’ll get to it a little bit later. But I will be talking about how to specifically make a starter for mead when I get to the hands-on part of this. So I mentioned yeast nutrients.

[00:17:59] [00:18:00] Somewhere I have, got another type of nutrient So c- nutrients do a couple things. They give the yeast something extra to feed on, but they also help the fermentation go faster. I will sometimes use a nutrient that I purchased online, on Amazon actually, called Fermaid. And there’s Fermaid K and Fermaid O.

[00:18:23] The only difference is Fermaid O is all organic ingredients. And it came in a plastic bag so I put it in this jar. But it’s basically spent yeast from previous batches and a bunch of other stuff they put in there. Let me pop it in front of this camera here. It’s just a powder. And that I will use sometimes, especially if I need a…

[00:18:45] to get a batch fermented and ready a lot sooner than I might the natural way. The natural way of doing it is a bit slower. And it does really, just a tiny bit of it, like maybe half a teaspoon per one gallon, will [00:19:00] ferment really fast and clean. It’s really nice to have. There are other options.

[00:19:05] Again, fresh or dried fruit you can pull in. If you’re a beekeeper, you get the raw, natural chunky honey, as I like to call it. All those bits from the hive will actually help the fermentation go along quicker. I’ve talked to commercial mead makers who refer to that as the stuff. When they get their honey in big 55 gallon drums, they want…

[00:19:25] They ask the beekeeper not to take any of that stuff off because it helps their mead ferment. But if you do buy something like Fermaid K, it helps move things along. Another thing that modern mead makers or super mead geeks, I might say, get into is something called staggered nutrient additions, and there’s a lot of stuff online about that.

[00:19:46] That’s just getting really particular and specific and putting a lot more time and effort into putting different amounts of honey in at different times, putting different amounts of nutrients in at different times. I don’t see [00:20:00] the need to do any of that. My mead is perfectly fine without that. So if you really wanna geek out and put a lot more time and effort into making your mead, you can look that up.

[00:20:09] But I’m gonna teach you how to just kinda do the simple, stress-free way of making it. Mix a few things together, check it here and there. Not a whole lot more to it than that So the core concepts for natural mead making. I was doing this presentation for a while, and at some point somebody said can you at least just give us a basic starter recipe?”

[00:20:33] Okay. So I’ve got one up there. I’ve got it on my books and various places online, but I’ll talk about the recipe I have here in a moment. But kind of the basic things you wanna go at, you wanna think about are using m- raw and unfiltered honey is the main thing. Local is always good.

[00:20:52] Other than supporting your local beekeeper or yourself if you are a beekeeper it also allows you to make a mead using possibly all [00:21:00] super local ingredients, which is a nice thing to have. Local honey. There’s all different types of honey as I’m sure depending on what the bees are getting into.

[00:21:10] So you’ll get the flavors of your locality, of the season it came from. Just a lot of reasons to do that, but raw and unfiltered. I mentioned the chunky bits of the hive, so the less it’s been messed with after it came from the hive, the better it is for mead. If you do go to, say a standard grocery store and just buy some honey that doesn’t say it’s raw or unfiltered or anything, it is still a type of sugar.

[00:21:35] It will ferment into mead. It may even be some pretty decent mead. But it also very well may have come been to China and back or whatever, and have more corn syrup than honey. So a lot of reasons for using local honey. Here in Kentucky, I do know some local beekeepers I occasionally get honey from. I am slowly attempting to keep my own [00:22:00] bees.

[00:22:00] I have hives, but haven’t been all that great about keeping bees in them. So I go to the local health food store, and I’ve got a honey here that… Let’s put it in front of this camera. So let’s see. It says local and raw. They don’t always say that, but, sometimes you just, may just need to talk to the person at the counter and ask them details about where they get their honey.

[00:22:25] Maybe even ask if you can call the beekeeper and ask them what, kinda how they do their gather their honey, where it comes from. This one’s from Kentucky. It says it’s from the blooms of spring. Sometimes, depending on the time of year, I will find honey that’s from fall, and that will give subtle differences to the mead.

[00:22:44] So mead can go anywhere, or honey can go anywhere from really light wildflower honey, which is generally the kind of honey you’re gonna wanna make for most meads, to really dark honeys like buckwheat. This [00:23:00] isn’t buckwheat, but I have several very large buckets Of this really dark, let me put it in front of this, dark old honey.

[00:23:15] It almost looks like molasses. It came from an Ohio, I went and taught a beekeeping supply class, and he had a whole bunch of this honey Several 55 gallon drums. There’s no way I could take all of that. They’ve been sitting in a, a barn for 50 years or who knows how long. So it had basically been going through multiple seasons of heat and cold.

[00:23:41] They couldn’t sell it ’cause it’s just really dark. And the honey by itself makes for a really odd, funky mead that gets better as it ages. It works well in beer. But it’s just an example of the variations of the types of honey that you can use. If you’re gonna use something like that, I might blend it with a lighter honey, or I [00:24:00] might just go ahead and make a mead with a lot of strong flavorings like ginger or hops or something like that.

[00:24:06] So getting to somebody’s earlier question about the smallest amount you can make. Really you can make any size you want, but most mead recipes and the easiest way to think about it is to just basically think in increments. So one gallon batches is probably the, the best one to start with and to continue with.

[00:24:26] It’s cheap if you’re buying your honey. It’s quicker. It’s easier. A lot less heavy to lift than the other option, which a lot of home brew stores will have these five gallon carboys. Fairly heavy empty. Quite heavy full. You can also get these the buckets usually they come in beer brewing and wine making kits.

[00:24:46] Some of them have spigots that’s useful for bottling. They… You can also find other… Get your own plastic bucket if you want, a food grade bucket. Not a big fan of plastic in general, but it’s hard to avoid, and [00:25:00] it’s a lot easier to deal with. The other option is these one gallon jugs, which you can buy in home brew stores Or there are all different kinds of ways you can come across it yourself.

[00:25:14] You don’t necessarily ever need to go to a home brew store to get stuff for making mead. Buy some cider or a gallon of wine or something like that. Lots of options for that. But what I’ve got here is a blueprint for a… If you follow this, it’ll basically make a semi-sweet, bordering a little bit on dry and a little bit sweet, basic mead.

[00:25:38] And about two and a half pounds to one gallon of water. And when I say water, I want spring water. This is from a local spring, Climact Springs here in Kentucky. You can actually go out to it and load up a bunch of, you can, load up on it for free. There’s usually a long line with pickup trucks full of big jugs and stuff in the back.

[00:25:59] Or I can just go [00:26:00] to my local health food store and pick it up if I can’t make it out there. You want spring water. You want a nice drinkable water with some natural minerals in it, which is why well water works as well. But you wanna avoid distilled water. Distilled water has had everything distilled from it.

[00:26:16] It’s basically dead water. So I haven’t used it, but I’ve heard people have tried using it in various types of ferments, and it just doesn’t work, or it doesn’t work well. Tap water, if it comes down to it, use it. Just boil it, make sure the chlorine evaporates through boil or by setting it out or running it through a filter.

[00:26:34] I usually use filtered tap water for beer. Generally, with mead, I try to get spring water I’m just gonna pop in here real quick. I think I saw another comment coming up question I have at almost every presentation. Honey that has basically started making mead on its own. It has started fermenting and overflowing.

[00:26:59] [00:27:00] Yes, you can definitely use it for mead. The process has already started. I personally, I would go ahead and just take whatever your recipe is and just mix it in with with the right amount of water. Add any other flavor ingredients you want. Make mead out of it. You don’t even have to add yeast because yeast has already started the process.

[00:27:20] And when I go into a little more about how to make a batch of mead, or how to actually create a a yeast starter, which you’ve already done, then that’ll give you a little more of an idea of what to do with it in the final recipe. But yeah, you can go ahead and use that. It happens often. That’s why I say mead can basically make itself.

[00:27:38] You’ll need to give it a little bit of help to move the process along. But when I get more into the rest of it, we’ll get on, we’ll get to that. So yeah, when you get to about three pounds per gallon of water, it’s gonna start bordering a little more on sweet. One thing I forgot to grab of that example here.

[00:27:59] This [00:28:00] is a, a mostly empty This one had about th- it says it has three pounds in it. So this plastic jar. Usually they come in quart jars, which is about two and three quarter pounds, a little under three pounds. Usually I’ll do a full quart jar of honey to a gallon of water to make a semi-sweet mead. There are subtleties depending on what you use, but that’s the basic blueprint to go by.

[00:28:27] Drop in or- my organic raisins for nutrients. And since they’re organic, they actually have some wild yeast of their own on them. I don’t always count, but about 10 to 12 small fingers full. Or if you’ve got yeast nutrient, about half a teaspoon. I just basically just squeeze the lemon and get a little bit of a pinch of lemon juice.

[00:28:46] The fourth step here you may want to avoid for your first mead, just to get an idea of what a basic mead tastes like. But on the other hand, that may produce some off flavors you may or may not like, so [00:29:00] these extra ingredients can help flavor the mead up, so number four is an optional step.

[00:29:05] Experiment with small amounts first. Definitely doesn’t hurt to go to look at a recipe to get some ideas for amounts. But again, herbs and spices and stuff like that, gotta be real careful. Just maybe a pinch here and there, and then see how it tastes. Do more or less in the next batch. But when it comes to fruit, fresh or dried berries, the amount really doesn’t matter.

[00:29:26] The more you put in, the more fruity it’ll taste. Now, there, there might be some really strong flavored fruits you want to consider, but generally fruit you don’t need to worry as much about putting too much. And step number five, you add yeast, and that’s where I start talking about yeast, and then I’ll get into the on how you create your own starter.

[00:29:51] You see a question about sanitizing jugs before fermentation. I don’t sanitize so much as sterilize. They’re hot [00:30:00] water. This is actually a a portable dishwasher that doubles as my peninsula in the kitchen here. For one gallon batches, I can pretty much put everything in here. W- rinse it or wash it if it’s really dirty, but rinse it out well with hot water and then put it in here and let that do the rest of it.

[00:30:20] Pretty much any modern home brewing book or recipe online you’re gonna read is gonna say that you wanna use all these chemicals to sanitize all your equipment heavily. I had all that stuff from my prior home brewing experience. I pretty much ran out of it all, and I don’t tend to use it. There, there is a reason, good reason for that but, I tended to go by the way people would’ve done historically, and they wouldn’t add anything like that.

[00:30:48] Now, there are things that they might have done historically that kind of worked as sanitizer, but essentially I just clean it with really hot water or set it in the dishwasher to sterilize and dry as I would with [00:31:00] any of my cooking stuff. That’s completely up to whatever your preference is. If you’re a home brewer or you go to a home brewing store and you find some of this cleaning stuff, go ahead and buy it and use it, sanitizing stuff.

[00:31:14] That’s up to you. Me, I just clean it normally. There is a type of oxygen-based cleaner called, One thing I didn’t grab here, but it’s called No Rinse. A One-Step No Rinse, and that’s because it’s supposedly completely natural environmentally safe. So mix it in with some hot water, kinda wash everything out with it, and then you set it out to dry after you’ve dumped all the water out, and that’s all there is to it.

[00:31:40] I understand that it works similar to the way hydrogen peroxide works, so that is another option, although I haven’t done that myself.

[00:31:55] A few of these questions here are probably ones I’ll pop back to [00:32:00] after I finish talking about yeast here. And one I will touch on, though: Can you use crystallized honey? Yes. That means it’s good, raw, natural honey. If it hasn’t been filtered, which is why it crystallizes. That’s one reason people filter it to sell in stores, because they f- figure people won’t buy it if it’s all weird and crystallized looking.

[00:32:20] Just subject it to some heat. Set it in maybe a jar of hot water, if it’s in a jar. Set it in a pot of hot water and let it or just mix. However you need to do it, you can recrystallize that honey. I’ve bought raw honey in big a bucket, and I went to start using it, and it was just super thick.

[00:32:40] So basically, I kinda had to just kinda work my way through it. So yeah, crystallized, that means it’s perfectly good honey. You just have to get some some warm water. And that is probably something I should mention that I haven’t touched on, is generally mead will ferment at your standard room temperature, 60 to 70 degrees or [00:33:00] so.

[00:33:00] Whatever you’re comfortable with is probably what the mead is comfortable with. There’s no cooking involved. Some recipes, especially a braggot, there are por- portions of the recipe where you do wanna use heat. For most standard meads I might warm the water on the stove beforehand just enough to be able to dissolve the honey is all I really do.

[00:33:21] So yeah, you might wanna get it a little hotter for that crystallized honey to really work it all out, but crystallized honey will definitely do the job

[00:33:31] So yeast, incredibly simple, complex subject. It’s very simple, easy to work with just some, following some basic parameters. But there’s a huge variety of the different types of yeast, and there’s all kinds of stuff you can geek out about when it comes to yeast, and I do enjoy geek o- geeking out about yeast.

[00:33:51] But it occurs naturally, it’s all over the place, it’s simple. I will talk about making a wild yeast starter. A wild yeast is another thing that [00:34:00] gets a bad rap. It’s maybe a tad unpredictable, but in general, my wild fermented yeasts turn out perfectly tasty. I do still use some commercial yeast as well Generally for the mead making you’re gonna wanna buy some wine yeast if you don’t wanna go the wild yeast route.

[00:34:19] I got a couple options listed here. There are lots of them. They’ve got these names that look like they were made in a laboratory because they were. They’re a single strain of yeast, whereas wild yeast is all these different strains competing, and the strongest one will be the one that kinda wins out in the end.

[00:34:34] These commercial yeasts have been isolated to a single strain in a lab that they know reaches a certain alcohol level, usually produces a certain flavor, is maybe better for, say, a white wine as opposed to a red wine. And, but they work just as well for meads

[00:34:52] So yeah, I’ve got some listed here. I’ve got more in my book if you’re excited to pick that up. D47 is a [00:35:00] good one for a general semi-sweet mead. It usually requires a little bit of extra nutrients. It’s a little bit of a slower fermenter than some of the others. These exciting names like EC-1118 or K1V1116.

[00:35:18] Really catchy name there. That, those two, those last two actually tend to work well for fruit wines and meads, and they ferment fast and clean. There’s also dry wine yeast and champagne yeast, which I don’t have right now. Those will ferment really fast and really strong, and can produce up to 18% alcohol if you give it enough honey.

[00:35:43] So a lot of r- a lot of options there. And I’ve also got some ale yeast, if you get into brewing beer. You can also use these to make mead, make lower alcohol meads, like five to six percent. They’re more like a beer, but those are called session meads. [00:36:00] And another thing you can do with, to make those types of, the session mead type of meads, it’s just a regular old baker’s yeast, bread yeast.

[00:36:10] Again, another thing that gets a bad rap for a bit of a reason. Bread yeast does tend to have a little bit of extra bacteria in it, which basically means that sometimes it’ll produce a little bit of a funky flavor you may or may not like. But if that’s all you got in your kitchen, or if you don’t really wanna be going to the store right now and you wanna make some mead you can order it from some home brew websites.

[00:36:31] There are some that ship, that are still shipping. They’re just shipping a lot slower. I ordered mine from Northern Brewer, but there are lots of other options. But if you’re already br- if you’re already late, or if you wanna risk going to the store right now, go ahead and get some bread yeast. Again, some people will say never do it, but I know lots of people who have made wine and mead and beer using bread yeast for a long time.

[00:36:54] That’s something that’s exclusively what they use. I’ve used it a few times and I’ve enjoyed what I’ve [00:37:00] made from it, but I like to try lots of different types of yeast.

[00:37:05] The pictures we’ve got here on the the bottom, which should be the same for you on the left, there’s those kind of white bubbles popping up on top of the mead. That’s a pellicle or a yeast bloom. That’s basically yeast that has started to grow on the surface. It’s not a bad thing. Some people worry that it could be dangerous.

[00:37:22] It’s not. It’s not. It’s related to mold because yeast is a type of fungus, but it’s not really a mold. It’s just a sign that your yeast is working. I have lots of meads that do that. I have a lot of people who make sour mead or beer intentionally and choose for that. But I have meads that, where that pops up, and they still taste perfectly not sour or anything like that.

[00:37:41] So not a bad thing to have happen. The grapes there, if you see grapes that are in, that haven’t been sprayed, or say plums or other types of fruit, you might see a white film on it. That’s actually a yeast bloom. You don’t see the yeast because it’s microscopic, but that’s the result of yeast just being on that surface.

[00:37:59] So that’s all the [00:38:00] yeast you need right there and in your honey, which is why it’s good to add some organic fruits to start a wild fermented mead. And then I- I’ve taken that yeast pack on the right, and I’ve rehydrated it in a little bit of kind of the mixed honey and water that I set aside. You don’t have to do that, but if you start it in a smaller amount, it’ll start going a lot quicker.

[00:38:23] But a lot of times I’ll just take that packet and I’ll just sprinkle it right in there. One packet of that size will usually ferment a five-gallon batch. So for a one gallon I’ll sprinkle in maybe half of the pack So yeah, if there are questions about types of yeast and how much yeast to use and all that kind of stuff, throw them up on there and I’ll get to them in a bit.

[00:38:45] But for now, I’m gonna get into

[00:38:51] wrangling some wild yeast. So there’s many different ways you can do this You can make a full five gallon batch and blend [00:39:00] everything you have together. In this case, I’m using a crock. I’ll talk about equipment after I get to yeast here. But you can do your full batch, mix it all up together, gather your wild yeast, or you can create a yeast starter that you can then add to a new batch and start multiple batches with that.

[00:39:17] So that jar on the right is a yeast starter that I’ve created. And these are just different examples of how you go about it. When I cut off here, I’m gonna go ahead and use this old camera and show you how to make your own batch. Now if you happen to have gathered some stuff at home you can do this with, it definitely doesn’t take much.

[00:39:35] But this is the part where I find in my live presentations I really need to go into more detail to talk about the difference between wild yeast and commercial yeast. So for the moment, I’m gonna skip it because I’m gonna come back to that and show you in the hands-on portion here And I don’t even know what time it is ’cause my computer doesn’t…

[00:39:58] I have to pop out of the [00:40:00] screen, but I think we’re good on time. Somebody can pop in if it looks like we’re getting close, but I got a little bit more of this presentation and then I’ll go and get into showing how to create a yeast starter and how to make a, an actual batch of mead, and talk about bottling and a few other things.

[00:40:17] So again, I mentioned you can do one gallon batches, five gallon batches. If you have a recipe for either of those, just do some basic math and just use more or less depending on whether you’re up scaling or down scaling. Another reason why one in five are good amounts to work with because they can, if you’re dumb at math like I am, they’re fairly easy to figure out how to go about that.

[00:40:43] So these are just lots of different types of equipment that you can use. For the most part, these one gallon batches, the stuff I’ve got there, you’ve probably got in your kitchen. A basic pot, which is stainless steel, aluminum, whatever, and that’s what I’ll use to either [00:41:00] warm my water to dissolve the honey in, or I’ll mix water and the honey all together in that, put it on a medium heat or so, stir it up, get it good to go, and then I’ll add it to my fermentation vessel with my other stuff.

[00:41:13] And just basic things like a stirring spoon. You got your one gallon jug there that you’ll be using later for fermentation. I’ve got a, an open vessel, which is this thing here. Just basically go to a grocery store and buy one of these glass jars that are used for putting lemonade or something in, serving at a picnic.

[00:41:37] They work great to ferment in. They’ve got this nice wide open mouth. They’re great for bottling. There’s a spigot there. I’m sure you know what a spigot looks like, but there it is. And I’ll talk about why it’s good to have a wide mouth when I get to making the yeast starter here.

[00:41:59] So that’s all your [00:42:00] equipment, basic stuff. Again, five gallon batches, you’re gonna need a little more. There are a couple things here you might not recognize. I’ll talk about what those are in a moment when I get to the next part of this. Excuse me. So racking and filtering

[00:42:20] Racking comes from a a wine-making term, which basically means to transfer from one vessel to the other. There’s some fancy French word that it comes from. I’m not gonna try to pronounce that, but it’s a standard home brewing term for transferring your mead, wine, or beer between vessels. And so what that does, there’s a couple reasons to use that.

[00:42:41] Some meads you make, you can actually make, if it’s a lower alcohol, you can have that ready to drink within a couple weeks, and you may not need to rack or filter at all. It’ll be a little cloudy, maybe taste a little yeasty, but if you can go from that basic to long-term, let it ferment for several months, let it sit in the bottle for several [00:43:00] more months or years.

[00:43:01] So there’s lots of variation as far as the time it takes for it to be ready to drink. But if you’re gonna be doing one where you really want it to kinda clarify and fully ferment, then it’s gonna need a couple rackings. So the first racking, when I’ve started the mead in open vessel, and I’ll talk about why you would wanna do that when I get to the hands-on part.

[00:43:24] But basically, it’s gonna sit in this with a cheesecloth over it or a dish towel, or just something to keep fruit fly and bugs and stuff from getting into it. And that’ll be for about a week. It’s in an aerobic environment, which is with air, so the initial fermentation needs lots of oxygen, which is why I keep it in that wide-mouth vessel and keep something over it that will let oxygen in, but keep other things from getting in.

[00:43:52] And that’s usually a week, maybe two weeks. While it’s fermenting, it’s producing all this CO2 that will keep bad things from getting in. [00:44:00] Long-term in that vessel, it’ll start to turn sour because acetobacter starts to settle in, turn it to vinegar if you let it go for too long. Good way to make vinegar if you wanna do that.

[00:44:11] But after that first week, two weeks, then I rack it the first time into a fermentation vessel.

[00:44:25] Here’s an example. I’ve already got one going. So I’m gonna get in here. And you notice I had that funnel. You can carefully do that first racking with a funnel to filter out things you may have put in it, like I had with those violets there. But once you’re past that primary fermentation, that which is the first stage, then you wanna be really careful about getting oxygen into the mead, because that can potentially produce flavors you don’t like.

[00:44:55] So from there on out, you’re gonna do … [00:45:00] Use a siphoning tube. And this one is attached to this cane here, plastic cane, which is called a racking cane. Just makes it a little easier for getting into the vessel And to do that you would use gravity. Set this in here. You’re gonna get it to where it’s just a little bit

[00:45:23] There’s not much in here ’cause this has already been racked. Let me get in front of this one. But the first racking, you’re gonna have about an inch or two of sediment, which is called lees, L-E-E-S. You wanna get it off of all that. That’s all spent yeast. So you kinda get this where it’s just above that.

[00:45:42] I start it with my mouth. Just lets me kinda taste how the meat is progressing, and once it starts turning to alcohol, there’s nothing-

[00:45:53] dangerous not wanting to do that. There is something you can buy where this basically sits in and it pumps it out. You gotta pump it [00:46:00] real slow to keep it from getting too oxygenated. So there are options there, but basically I just do an old-fashioned siphon. You can buy these at a home brew store, or go to your local hardware store.

[00:46:11] You’re not gonna find a racking cane, but you’ll find a tubing that’s designed for water, and you can get it from there. So that’s what racking is. Second racking, I’m gonna give it about a month once it’s in this vessel with the airlock. And the airlock is, again, something you can get at a home brew supply store.

[00:46:33] Get in there. Got a little cork with a hole in it, a hollow tube. This little thing sitting on top of it, some water in it. Keeps fruit flies and stuff from getting in. CO2 can escape

[00:46:48] And the water on the top thing here keeps acetobacter from getting in, turning into vinegar. If you were to shut, close this off entirely, that CO2 would just be all pent up in here. You’ll risk [00:47:00] either an exploding jar or opening it and having a gushy mess. They’re cheap, pretty easy to come by if you can go to a home brew store or website.

[00:47:10] But take a balloon, pop it on there, it’ll do the exact same thing. CO2 escapes, blows the balloon up a little bit, keeps things from getting out, getting into it. So there are some other options than buying an airlock. People get pretty creative with creating their own airlocks sometimes. So first month it’s gonna be sitting in there, and it can sit for quite a while without acetobacter turning into vinegar.

[00:47:34] You leave it on those leaves for too long though the yeast that’s still alive is gonna start trying to get into those and produce some off flavors. So after the first racking from fir- from primary fermentation, second racking

[00:47:50] Will be I usually keep my notes on masking tape on the jar, just when I racked, when I made it. I keep some in a separate notebook as well, but that’s a good way for me [00:48:00] to know what’s in there, and keep track of my racking. After that, it’ll be pretty clear and you only have a tiny bit of sediment.

[00:48:07] A higher alcohol meads can take up to as long as six months, maybe even a little longer in a five gallon to fully ferment. But generally after those first two rackings, you’re pretty much good until you’re ready to bottle. Sometimes it’ll still not quite be clarified or I’ve got a really high alcohol mead that I might rack one more time.

[00:48:26] But your next racking is gonna be into a bottling vessel. Anything with a spigot really that can hold, can safely hold food grade stuff. So again, anywhere from that one gallon thing to one of these. There are other creative ways you can bottle. Use that siphoning tube or whatever, but if you can get something with a spigot, that’s the easiest way of doing it.

[00:48:54] So that’s kind of the basics of racking and filtering. I do have a video of me doing it here, [00:49:00] but I save that for my live presentation since I’ll be doing live stuff here in a moment

[00:49:08] Trying not to lose my voice here. So bottling and aging. This is the last slide here, and we’ll get to it. I actually have examples of some of these things. You can bottle, all kinds of things. You can go to a homebrew store and buy equipment for

[00:49:30] Lots of my mead I will bottle in beer bottles. Just save craft beer bottles. It’s gotta be the kind that you can pop. You don’t wanna use screw top. There are some, some things you can use where you can use a screw on, but screw on beer bottles, those, those lids really don’t screw back on tight enough to really be worth using.

[00:49:53] And again, one disadvantage is you have to buy this, you have to buy something. This is fairly cheap. It’s a wing style capper. [00:50:00] You also have to buy new caps. And it has a nice little magnet on there, so you take that, set it on the bottle. I basically set it… Usually I’m sitting on the couch watching Netflix or something, and I set it down in front of me and pops the the cap on pretty easy.

[00:50:20] Fairly affordable way of going about it.

[00:50:25] A lot of you making, a lot of people making mead are going to want to bottle it in a nice wine glass. So a lot of cork workers are Italian made metal things that can cost $200 or $300. Most homebrew stores sell something like this that’s about $70. It has, has options for capping as well, but I like my wing style capper.

[00:50:48] Pretty simple. You pop a cork into that. I actually moisten them first in some… Kinda help sterilize them too. Heat up some water, cut off the heat, set the corks in ’em, [00:51:00] otherwise they’re really tough to get in there. And just use this lever to pop it in there. And this also doubles as an ice cream maker.

[00:51:10] When my kids get a hold of it, they pretend they’re doing an ice cream stand or something. And the nice thing about this is you can pull this metal thing out and adjust it for size, ’cause wine bottles come in all different types and sizes.

[00:51:28] If you are gonna, going to bottle it with a wine bottle, I usually try to get the longest cork I can. They come in different sizes. The longer it is, the longer you can safely age it. But give it about around an inch to two inches below where the cork stops. You got a little leeway to play around with there.

[00:51:46] Just don’t fill it all the way up to where the cork is, and definitely don’t fill it all the way or you’re gonna have a bunch of mead come out when you pop that cork, and

[00:51:58] Or [00:52:00] You know what are these wing style flip top, swing top not wing style, but you have flip top or swing top, people call them different things. Grolsch beer comes in them. So I’m sure you’ve all seen these, especially if you’re into kombucha or something. The only thing you have to do is occasionally, and I’ve hardly ever had to do it, is replace this gasket if it starts to fray a little bit.

[00:52:24] You can use these multiple times. They’re thick. They can hold heavily carbonated beverages up to a point. If I buy a bottle of something too carbonated, I have had the bottom of one of these kind of pop off. So just take care of it if it comes to anything carbonated. And there are attached to screw top bottles, is you don’t wanna do something that’s gonna age, that you wanna age for years in something like this.

[00:52:48] But, people have donated, and I’ve gathered myself all different kinds of bottles. It’s just a kombucha bottle. It’s really thick glass, and I’ve made some beers and stuff like that, that I put in these. [00:53:00] Usually it’s something I wanna drink what’s in there more than a month or two. Lots of options there

[00:53:08] So And again, this is something I can get a little more to, but that’s it for the video or for the PowerPoint. Looks like I’ve officially got, I think maybe half an hour or so left here. I’m gonna check some questions, and then I’m gonna get to making a mead starter and talking a little more about yeast and starting a batch of mead.

[00:53:30] Let’s see what we’ve got here Oh, I clicked on it wrong, but there it is

[00:53:40] Okay. Yeah, I’m just seeing the same questions from before, the smallest batch possible, and I will go a little more into that. But it looks like I believe I’m good for Questions here. If more pop up, go ahead [00:54:00] and

[00:54:03] É, sei

[00:54:09] Okay, I’m gonna click on these ones that says I’ve already answered them if I didn’t Or if you have more questions, just let me know. I just wanna clear that out so that I know when new ones come up

[00:54:25] So now this is where I would, in my live presentation, I open it up to questions. We’ve already done that, answered a few during the presentation. But I actually have a little more time than I have in my live ones, so I’m gonna get to actually talking about making a meat starter and an actual batch of meat.

[00:54:46] So let me get a couple things set up for doing

[00:54:51] that.

[00:54:57] So what I did [00:55:00] Sometime mid last week I went out to my front yard, and I shared some pictures of this that you may or may not seen when signing up for this class. It’s gonna be hard for you to really see what’s in here probably.

[00:55:19] I’m gonna just hold it up there.

[00:55:22] But basically what I have here is I went out and I mixed…

[00:55:25] I took my jar here. Any size will work, a quart, pint, whatever. A pint’s usually best. That’s what I do when I do a live hands-on. Everybody has a pint jar. The actual amount doesn’t matter a lot so much as the ratio. I do, fill it up maybe an eighth or so, even up to a quarter, then I take spring water and fill it up to about three-quarters or so, dissolve it really well, and then I’ll take

[00:55:55] Some dried fruit, which I haven’t actually put any in this yet, but like [00:56:00] raisins or whatever else I’ve got But since it was it was good timing, I went to my yard and I’ve got some wild violet in here. I’ve got some dandelion petals, dandelion head, and a sprig of yarrow. I have yarrow growing in my herb garden.

[00:56:16] And just put them all in there. They’re just gonna do a few different things. They’re all gonna have wild yeast on them, and they’re also gonna give the the yeast some extra nutrients to feed on. And basically, this is just how you can go ahead and create a yeast starter. Generally, depending on the time of the year, this will be active and fizzy, and you will definitely know you have a live, active yeast starter in about three days max, three to five days.

[00:56:46] Because of the time of the year, the way it is here, we’ve had days and nights that go from almost summer-like to spring warmth to back to cold again. So because of the temperature variations, this hasn’t come alive yet. [00:57:00] When I’ve done this around the winter or fall time or something like that, it can take a week to even almost two weeks for it to fully actually become active.

[00:57:10] So I’m gonna need to give this a little more time. Was hoping it’d be alive by now, but the base, that’s what you will do, is you’ll mix them in together. And again, you can do this in a… You saw in that picture I had earlier, I was doing it in my five-gallon crock, ceramic crock. And a side note about crocks, if you use those, if you get an antique one, get a lead testing kit from a hardware store.

[00:57:33] Check to make sure there’s not lead glazing on it and there’s no cracks on the inside. Otherwise, they’re great to use for the primary fermentation. You’re not gonna wanna leave it in there for more than, two weeks or so, unless you wanna make a bunch of vinegar. So with that I’ll have a big stir stick that I use.

[00:57:52] Or if I’m at home and, or if I do one of these small jars, I just take, say we collect some chopsticks here and there when we get some Chinese food. [00:58:00] Give it a really good stir to dissolve everything. Then every two to three so two to three times a day, you’re gonna wanna go and keep stirring it because you want all that aeration during the initial phase.

[00:58:15] That’s what kinda keeps the yeast from just poofing out and hanging out in the bottom and doing nothing. So you kinda keep doing that two or three times a day at least, if not more. There are all kinds of historical traditions and modern traditions that people use for doing this. Again, you wanna treat it nice.

[00:58:31] You wanna set it in a nice, fairly warm area. Note out of direct sunlight. Direct sunlight can negatively affect the flavor long-term. So it can sit in a corner of your kitchen near a window, just try and to set it somewhere it’s gonna get direct sunlight. Maybe put a towel over the whole thing if you need to.

[00:58:48] And sing to it if you want or do whatever. You’re trying to bring this thing alive. Historically, people would, have read various things. They would either meditate quietly or sometimes it’ll be a communal thing where everybody [00:59:00] would kinda gather and try and bring the yeast alive.

[00:59:04] Parts of Norway and Finland, even today, they still do kinda the opposite. They’ll bang pots and pans. They’ll scream at it. They’re trying to wake the yeast up. In Norway, they have screaming condition- or screaming competitions sometimes. Even today, whoever screams the loudest into the new va- vat of, in this case, beer, will wake up the yeast spirits, essentially.

[00:59:26] So do whatever your thing is. But yes, just give it lots of attention, but also give it lots of time to just kinda sit there. And again, generally, once it comes alive, you saw some pictures earlier in my PowerPoint, you’ll know. It’ll start fizzing. You’ll see this white foam kind of develop on the top. A little…

[00:59:45] Basically, CO2 has started to be produced is what’s going on. I’m gonna look real quick at a question I see has popped up Does it… Yeah, it’s a that’s a good question here. [01:00:00] Does a gallon jug overfill with a gallon of water plus a quart of honey? That’s a weird way for me to describe the ratio.

[01:00:09] I, I should just think on it and come up with a, a better way of saying it. Usually I address this when I’m mentioning it. Basically, you’re gonna have a gallon jug of water, or in this case a… you’re not gonna end up putting that full gallon in with the initial batch. You’re gonna take the amount of honey you want first, and use, say maybe half of the amount of water that you’re gonna need.

[01:00:36] Get those all blended up, get them in the jug. Fill it up. There’s at least- Now even after primary fermentation, it’s still gonna have a fair bit of activity so you may not wanna fill it all the way the first time around, but to just below the kind of the neck is where you’re gonna wanna keep it most of the time[01:01:00]

[01:01:02] And each time you rack, you’re gonna lose a little bit of water, so you’re gonna be adding a little bit more of that water. And in that case, definitely make sure it’s not chlorinated water when you refill it to bring it back up to this. So with the initial fermentation, you’re not gonna use the full one gallon of water.

[01:01:22] So really, it’s more of a, kind of a ratio thing in itself. Hopefully that answers that. Yeah it’s something that people keep getting me on, and I’m always trying to make sure I remember to address it, or maybe I should find a better way to address it the first time around. So really, it’s more, it’s three-quarters of a gallon of water to a quart or so of honey for the initial batch.

[01:01:44] And then over time, you can be adding a little bit more each time. So it’s not really an exact amount that we’re working with there. So yeah, hopefully that, that covered that. But good que- good question or your standard one I often get for good reason. [01:02:00] So I’m going to go ahead and show you how I would start a one-gallon batch.

[01:02:06] So I’ve had to clean this out, and it’s actually been sitting in my dishwasher sterilizing, so it’s a nice clean jug. And I actually warmed up some water on the stove The honey I happen to have here this was initially a full four pounds. So it’s somewhere around three pounds now. I’m not gonna use the full amount for this.

[01:02:31] But there… Like I- there are different kinds of ways of getting the mead started. Again, you can dissolve it in a pot on the stove. It gives you a little m- more of a mess to clean up. Or you can warm the water in advance. And this is often the way I do it. Take my funnel and just go ahead and-

[01:02:55] We’re in there. Next funnel And I get… [01:03:00] Sometimes I will also add more honey later as well, especially if I’m making a sweeter mead. I’m not necessarily gonna add all the honey right off the bat. So again, with that gallon of water to a quart or two to three pounds of honey, that can be tweaked throughout the entire process.

[01:03:15] Once you get into it or get used to the different ratios you like to work with, that kind of becomes a personal preference. I see a, a question popping up there. I’m gonna do a little bit more of this

[01:03:30] and get some of the sticky off my hands.

[01:03:36] Definitely can be a messy process. Often I spill a little bit. I’m surprised my kids haven’t come running in. This is usually the part when they wanna help out, take care of any excess honey. Any questions popping up here?

[01:03:54] Question about sour mead. I’m not sure I saw that one specifically, [01:04:00] but, one thing I will say is I personally do everything I can to avoid any kind of sour flavor in my meads and beer. I’m just not a sour beer fan. I personally think there’s something wrong with it if it’s sour. That’s my personal preference.

[01:04:16] So there are people who intentionally make sour meads and beers, and there is, there are ways of going about that. Basically you can intentionally make it start to turn sour by leaving it open fermenting it for, say, like a month or so. It’s not something I have direct experience with because it’s just not something I wanna do.

[01:04:33] At some point I should experiment with it just so I can answer questions. I’ll check and see if that maybe answered. Looks like another one’s popped up there. I don’t know what the specific question was but yeah, you can make it intentionally sour, but generally you wanna avoid that

[01:04:52] So yeah, I’m not… All I see is did, did you answer the, the question about sour mead? I’m not entirely sure specifically what the question [01:05:00] was or if it was addressed in something else I said. But if you have anything more about that, feel free to ask. Basically you can make it turn sour or turn full on to vinegar.

[01:05:10] All kinds of people play around with doing open fermentation for long enough to actually intentionally draw in sour funky flavors. That’s something you can definitely experiment and play around with. My goal is to get it into an airlock container, keep it from turning sour. I do have some wild ferments that aren’t, don’t necessarily turn out sour, but because it’s wild fermentation it’s a little more unpredictable.

[01:05:32] They come out maybe really tart with a s- strong sour edge, but not like overly sour. I personally am not a huge fan of that. My taste buds just have a hard time with it. My wife tries those. She loves them. Other people I know try them. They love them that way. So with wild fermentation, you got a good chance that you’ll get some degree of sour or tart, but most times I don’t get that.

[01:05:54] So hopefully that answered that well enough. I’m gonna add some water to this, and then I’m gonna [01:06:00] check and see what this question is that just popped up. But I wanna get this

[01:06:08] Water, honey and water dissolving in here. Get most of that honey out of the funnel if I can

[01:06:21] Oh, okay. Your mead turned s- your mead turned out sour, and you don’t want that. And can I fix it? The only way I fix that is I give it to my wife or somebody because they tend to like it that way. Yeah, maybe it’s possible even people who like sour meads and tart meads, that is possible that it turns out sour in a bad way.

[01:06:41] As far as fixing it one thing you can potentially do is blend it, whether it’s your own mead or some wine or something else. You just blend it with something that’s not sour and keep messing with the amounts until it, it gets somewhere where you can handle the taste, maybe even like it. Make a cocktail out of [01:07:00] it, sweet and sour maybe, or I’m sorry, like a whiskey sour or something like that.

[01:07:05] There are a lot of options you can do with, as far as mixing it with something else. But as far as making it un-sour that’s just not gonna happen. It could be the equipment wasn’t quite clean enough. It could be you left it open fermentation. Questions like that, it’s… There, there are so many factors that could potentially cause that, so it’s hard to say why that would’ve turned out that way.

[01:07:27] But as far as fixing it yeah, blend it with even, maybe even take some… Sometimes if a mead is a bit too, either s- sour tart or maybe way too dry, then I’ll make a little bit of a honey water mix, a sugar syrup sort of a thing with honey, and then blend it like that. So hopefully that answers that question well enough.

[01:07:50] Again, that’s one of those things, the answer is, it varies as to why it turned out sour [01:08:00] Now if we were at one of Mother Earth News Fairs and I was finishing this up and running over to sign books, then I would have you follow me and we can talk about your meat more and figure out all the things that happened So our, the question I had going here what I will throw out before I answer that question, that you should have all my contact information if you do have questions after this on my PowerPoint slide, which I believe Mother Earth News will have available.

[01:08:29] I’m on Facebook and pretty much most of the social medias. I have a website, which is just my name, jeremy-zimmerman.com. So feel free to pop me a message giving me a little more details on what you did with a particular mead and wanting to know why it turned out the way it did or if you just have your own kind of questions.

[01:08:49] Basically, this is how you make mead right here. You mix up honey and water. That’s it. There is definitely more to it than that, but it is the initial process of making it. [01:09:00] It’s pretty basic. Which is why it’s good to at least have the water a bit warm. You can see this is already starting to… If it was cold, that honey would just hang out at the bottom here.

[01:09:13] But it’s dissolving pretty well. See, I don’t have the full amount yet. Now that it’s pretty well dissolved, I’m gonna pop a little more.

[01:09:24] I love when that happens. One lovely thing about these jugs. Like, why it’s good to have this kind of thing in your kitchen.

[01:09:35] So let me take care of that. The spigot just popped off of that thing. Good thing I keep towels on the floor just for such situations It can be messy. Be prepared for that. I’m gonna look at a question here Use the same amount of wild yeast in place as the wine [01:10:00] yeast Let me clear this out.

[01:10:06] So as far as amounts

[01:10:11] The amounts vary. You really can’t… You can do too much, but it doesn’t necessarily hurt to do too much, it’ll just affect the flavor a tiny bit differently. It’s better to do a bit too much than not quite enough. As far as the amounts of wild yeast, when you’re creating a wild yeast starter, say you’re doing this full batch, there really is no particular amount that you’re adding.

[01:10:33] You’re just mixing everything together, setting it out, letting it start fermenting. Once it starts fizzing and is active, the yeast is already in there. That’s it. If you’re creating the starter in advance, honestly, once this thing comes alive, I might just dump the whole thing in there, ’cause it’s just active starter.

[01:10:54] If I’ve left a little space for some extra honey and water, I’ll drop it all in there. [01:11:00] But honestly, you need about one to two tablespoons per gallon, is all you really need to start a new batch. And if you wanna save this for a future batch, put a lid on it loosely, put it in the refrigerator. That completely brings fermentation to a standstill pretty much.

[01:11:18] Bring it out, set it somewhere warm when you’re ready to use it again. So as far as amounts of commercial yeast versus wild yeast, it depends on how you’re heading it. One thing about commercial yeast, I showed you the packets earlier, is it’s in powdered form. So once this was active, they took any yeast that kind of gathered on the top and they dehydrated it.

[01:11:41] So it’s basically concentrated in a powdered form. When you got it in liquid form, again, maybe two tablespoons or so of this is around packet to half a packet of commercial yeast. Again, that’s not really one where the amounts matter a lot. [01:12:00] So with wild yeast, it’s I either do the entire batch, bring that whole thing alive and it’s already all in there, or I start a smaller starter, use about that for the next one.

[01:12:12] And say with bread yeast, I might, if I don’t have just a packet of it like I just showed you, my wife keeps keeps some good bread yeast in a jar in the fridge. I might take a teaspoon of that and put it into a gallon. So yeah, the, pretty much the answer to your question is, it varies a little bit.

[01:12:31] But you don’t… When you’re talking wild yeast versus commercial yeast, they’re really two different ways of going about the same thing. And the, the amounts don’t matter a lot. Hopefully that answered that well enough. I I would… I don’t get too particular about that So again, too much yeast isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

[01:12:53] If you only put a tiny bit in there, it’s not really gonna give the sugars enough to work with. So always err on the side of a little too much than not [01:13:00] enough. But if you create your own starter, about a tablespoon, maybe up pouring up to two tablespoons. Since this is already really started, hasn’t started yet, but I know it’s been sitting out for a bit.

[01:13:14] Honestly, that’s pretty much what I would do there. I don’t necessarily measure out specific amounts because I know a bit of it’s gonna get gone. And what I may end up doing is Bringing this, bringing another one over here, setting it out, spraying it several times a day, singing to it, screaming at it.

[01:13:36] Sometimes my kids help with that part And I might add a few things to this after we close out here. I haven’t really decided yet what kind of media I’m gonna make out of this. Excuse me.

[01:13:52] But there’s all kinds of things. I’ve got dried yarrow, leaf and flower, that in addition to what [01:14:00] I grow in my yard I forage. I go to my local health food store or a website like Mountain Rose Herbs is one of my favorites. They’re ethical, they’re organic, all that kind of stuff. Almost any kind of herb you can think about, roots, all kinds of stuff you can get from them.

[01:14:18] I go, I travel or I go out in the woods and I dig up sassafras root. I might use sassafras in a mead or a beer. Osha root. Just an example of the many different types of things you can use. This comes from Colorado. It’s similar to sassafras in the flavoring aroma it gives out.

[01:14:39] Lots of options for flavoring. Again, lots of different types of fruit you can use and that sort of thing. So I’ve got my hanging water sitting here. I’m gonna think a little bit on what kind of mead I wanna make

[01:14:58] And sometimes I need a little help [01:15:00] thinking. In this case, I’ve got a, a bottle of a beer here. It’s got some honey in it, and some yeast from Norway called Gj виk. So it’s basically a Viking beer.

[01:15:14] Water isn’t really doing it for me So

[01:15:23] Oh. That’s how I like my drinks. Or you can use this horn my brother got me back from Iceland. I’ve fit almost a six pack of Guinness in that before. I don’t drink quite that much anymore though, but all different kinds, ways you can drink your mead. I believe that’s everything I’ve got. We’re nearing the end here, it looks like.

[01:15:46] If you have any final questions, again, feel free to ask me later. A few other things I’ve got sitting out here. Ginger. Sometimes I use ginger in our mead. The amounts vary depending on what you like as far as ginger. For a [01:16:00] gallon batch, I might use maybe an inch or so of it. If I want a subtle ginger flavor, I’ll just take a whole bunch of it and plop it in there if I want more.

[01:16:13] And show a couple of the meads I have going here. This was just in a bottle that I purchased and saved. Let me put it here. Camelot Mead. It’s a cheaper mead to buy, which is good if you don’t wanna spend a lot of money. It’s not bad, it’s not great, but I empty it out pretty quick and I put an elderberry mead in here.

[01:16:34] So I make a lot of elderberry mead and wine. It’s good for you, and it makes you- This is one I didn’t talk about earlier, but another thing you can do is put maple syrup, blend it with your honey, and make, esmeralda or something like that. I’m not quite sure how you pronounce that. But that’s the that’s a maple syrup we use. A lot of different options. You can blend [01:17:00] sugars. If you wanna try to do a starter or make something and you’re at home and you don’t quite have that much honey, you can use the same amount pound wise of, any kind of sugar really.

[01:17:15] But I try to get organic cane sugar. And it won’t be as neat because it’s not made from honey. But you can make some of it pretty much like me and a hard soda using sugar instead of honey. Or blend the two together. All right, you can blend different types of sugars. A little bit of molasses. There’s a lot of options there.

[01:17:35] So I’m gonna have another drink here. But thanks for joining me. Oh-