This is my first mead and I'm hoping to make it a sweet one.
I'm not adding any spices or flavouring to the main fermenter, but I might flavour each secondary fermenter with different flavours. If it turns out too dry, I'll back sweeten with some pure honey.
I wasn't sure what honey I wanted to use, so I bought a sample of pretty much every honey I could find.
I wanted something affordable, but with an interesting flavour.
I really liked the bluegum based honey, but it was pretty expensive per 100g (unit pricing is awesome).
I ended up deciding on bramwell's mixed blossom honey from aldi. It's sweet, but has interesting floral flavours and nice complexiy.
I'd really like to do a small batch of the just the blue gum honey at a later date.
Equipment
Coopers brew DIY beer kit
Bucket
thermometer
kettle
heat mat
stool (oddvar from ikea)
towelles
Ingredients
Lavlin ec 1118 yeast 5g
2.5kg capilano honey
6 x 700g bramwells mixed blossom aldi
400g beechworth tasmanian leatherwood
500g bramwells pure Australian honet aldi
400g bramwells yellowbox
400g bramwells blue gum
500g coles pure Australian honey
9kg total honey
2L aldi apple juice
2-3 litres of boiling water to mix up the honey and bring the wort up to temperature, around 25 degrees
25 litres Total
Total cost
$75 / 25 L -> $3 per litre
Commercial mead is around $20 per litre
Apple juice is to help start the yeast culture build, with easy to digest, simple sugars.
Mixing
Put jars of honey into a bath of hot water to warm and help honey to pour.
Put boiling water into the fermenter, pour in honey and stir. added apple juice, added cold water until reached 25 ltites, and about 30 degrees. stirred wort up.
took Original Gravity measurement
started yeast rehydration, with 30mls hot water, checking the temperature with a thermometer from target.
added yeast to fermenter
put heat mat on stool, put fermenter on heat mat, put towelles around fermenter (it's about 9 degrees C ambient temp at the moment!)
Specific Gravity Measurements
OG
16/6/2013 Guess 120 off scale
SG
19/6/2013 112 on scale
20/6/2013 110 at 20 degrees
21/6/2013 110 at 18 degrees
tastes of honey water and cider
22/6/2013 108 at 20 degrees
23/6/2013 106 19 degrees
agitated fermenter by shaking it
24/6/2013 92 at 18 degrees
25/6/2013 91 at 21 degrees
26/6/2013 87 at 21 degrees
26/6/2013 83 at 22 degrees
tastes of mead, honey water, cider and butter
30/6/2013 78 at 22 degrees
1/7/2013 75 at 23 degrees
3/7/2013 71 at 24 degrees
5/7/2013 61 at 21 degrees
tastes like a layer of vodka is sitting on the top :S
10/7/2013 60 at 19 degrees
starting to taste like mead mixed in with honey water, starting to lose cider taste
agitated fermenter by shaking it
12/7/2013 49 at 22 degrees
massive drop in SG, tastes much more like mead, vodka taste has gone, but it's still quite strong tasting.
This is taking a while .... ( almost a month in primary fermentation)
14/7/2013 39 at 25 degrees
Strong Alcohol Weak mead Flavour
15/7/2013 35 at 24 degrees
18/7/2013 31 at 24 degrees
19/7/2013 28 at 22 degrees
21/7/2013 31 at 18 degrees
22/7/2013 26 at 18 degrees
23/7/2013 25 ar 18 degrees
25/7/2013 25 at 19 degrees
26/7/2013 23 at 21 degrees
28/7/2013 21 at 20 degrees
Dry and sour, some carbonation, mead like flavour, but not mead yet.
29/7/2013 19 at 24 degrees
31/7/2013 19 at 20 degrees
3/7/2013 16 at 18 degrees
4/7/2013 15 at 18 degrees
6/7/2013 13 at 18 degrees
8/7/2013 13 at 18 degrees
9/7/2013 12 at 18 degrees
10/7/2013 11 at 17 degrees
11/7/2013 10 at 17 degrees
12/7/2013 9 at 17 degrees
14/7/2013 7 at 22 degrees
15/7/2013 7 at 22 degrees
16/7/2013 7 at 23
17/7/2013 7 at 24 degrees
Bottled 17/7/2013
final abv 16.6%