The Honey Connoisseur lays it all out on the table; Marina Marchese and Kim Flottum tell the whole story including its dark side in an eloquent style. The reader will never look at the honey jar the same way. This is the book I've been looking for. As a restaurateur who has traveled high and low in search of the world's finest wines, I have always respected the role terroir plays in creating and nurturing a region's culinary personality. Ever since I took up beekeeping, I've been on the hunt for the definitive guide to the essence of honey: how to taste it, which local factors influence its flavor, and most importantly for me, how to pair it with other ingredients like an expert.
This book makes me want to bake with all the varieties. Finally, a honey bible! The Honey Connoisseur is truly a great book. Together, they have composed the preeminent book about honey and its regional culinary food pairings. Fully revised and expanded, How to Brew is the definitive guide to making quality beers at home. Palmer adeptly covers the full range of brewing possibilities—accurately, clearly and simply.
From ingredients and methods to recipes and equipment, this book is loaded with valuable information for any stage brewer.
More great advice from Charlie Papazian, homebrew master and author of the bestselling The Complete Joy of Homebrewing. The information is 98 percent new information, including improved procedures for beginning and malt-extract brewers as well as advanced and veteran brewers. There are loads of new recipes and useful charts and data that I continually refer to in my own homebrew recipe formulation I still homebrew about 20 batches a year. My theme throughout is 'Keep it practical.
Keep it useful. I did Easy-to-follow techniques and trouble-shooting tips Answers to the most-often asked questions A guide to world beer styles Useful facts on fermenting, yeast culturing and stove-top boiling Charts, tables, support information and much, much more Over 60 exotic recipes to try -- from "You'll See" Coriander Amber Ale to Waialeale Chablis Mead Make sure to check out the third edition of The Complete Joy of Homebrewing. Skip to content.
The Compleat Meadmaker. The Compleat Meadmaker Book Review:. The Complete Guide to Making Mead. The Big Book of Mead Recipes. Make Mead Like a Viking. Making Wild Wines Meads. Making Mead.
Making Mead Book Review:. Mad about Mead. Mad about Mead Book Review:. Making Mead honey Wine. Author : Roger A. Making Mead honey Wine Book Review:. Making Your Own Mead. The information given is unique as there are few, if any, books on the subject of mead and honey wines that give such clear and concise knowledge of this enthralling topic.
Grab your almanacs! Many of us have decided to up sticks and leave the city behind for a less frenetic existence in the country. Whether you've already made the move, or are dreaming of doing so one day, this is the book for you. Covering bee-keeping, poultry rearing, pig farming, bread baking, wood-chopping, fire-laying, bartering and much more, How to Live in the Country is the perfect source of inspiration for old hands and beginners alike: useful, informative but also refreshingly honest and realistic.
Tom Hodgkinson draws on the wisdom of an eclectic range of thinkers and writers as he guides us through each month of the year, giving lists of tasks for both garden and animal husbandry, offering tips and short-cuts, and weaving in stories about his own experience of raising a young family in rural Devon. We are in the midst of a massive cultural shift away from consumerism and toward a vibrant and very active countermovement that has been thriving on the outskirts for quite some time—do-it-yourselfers who make frugal, homemade living hip are challenging the notion that true wealth has anything to do with money.
In Making It, Coyne and Knutzen, who are at the forefront of this movement, provide readers with all the tools they need for this radical shift in home economics. The projects range from simple to ambitious and include activities done in the home, in the garden, and out in the streets. With step-by-step instructions for a wide range of projects—from growing food in an apartment and building a ninety-nine-cent solar oven to creating safe, effective laundry soap for pennies a gallon and fishing in urban waterways—Making It will be the go-to source for post-consumer living activities that are fun, inexpensive, and eminently doable.
Within hours of buying this book, readers will be able to start transitioning into a creative, sustainable mode of living that is not just a temporary fad but a cultural revolution. She sent an email sharing her fermentation and teaching experience and was quickly scheduled to teach her first fermentation class.
She didn't tell the organizer at the time, but Danielle had never made muscadine wine in her life. She immediately ran out and bought some muscadines, found a recipe, and made the wine. The class went great and thus, Fermdamentals was born. At Fermdamentals Danielle teaches the fundamentals of fermentation. While her blog is still active, it contains very few actual recipes. It is supported by an extensive glossary and index.
It is a comprehensive guide and encyclopedia for both novice and sage alike who will find the information and expertise a true adjunct for improving their techniques in mead and wine production.
The information given is unique as there are few, if any, books on the subject of mead and honey wines that give such clear and concise knowledge of this enthralling topic. Grab your almanacs! Many of us have decided to up sticks and leave the city behind for a less frenetic existence in the country. Whether you've already made the move, or are dreaming of doing so one day, this is the book for you. Covering bee-keeping, poultry rearing, pig farming, bread baking, wood-chopping, fire-laying, bartering and much more, How to Live in the Country is the perfect source of inspiration for old hands and beginners alike: useful, informative but also refreshingly honest and realistic.
Tom Hodgkinson draws on the wisdom of an eclectic range of thinkers and writers as he guides us through each month of the year, giving lists of tasks for both garden and animal husbandry, offering tips and short-cuts, and weaving in stories about his own experience of raising a young family in rural Devon. Spending money is the last thing anyone wants to do right now. We are in the midst of a massive cultural shift away from consumerism and toward a vibrant and very active countermovement that has been thriving on the outskirts for quite some time—do-it-yourselfers who make frugal, homemade living hip are challenging the notion that true wealth has anything to do with money.
In Making It, Coyne and Knutzen, who are at the forefront of this movement, provide readers with all the tools they need for this radical shift in home economics. The projects range from simple to ambitious and include activities done in the home, in the garden, and out in the streets. With step-by-step instructions for a wide range of projects—from growing food in an apartment and building a ninety-nine-cent solar oven to creating safe, effective laundry soap for pennies a gallon and fishing in urban waterways—Making It will be the go-to source for post-consumer living activities that are fun, inexpensive, and eminently doable.
Within hours of buying this book, readers will be able to start transitioning into a creative, sustainable mode of living that is not just a temporary fad but a cultural revolution. After she had been fermenting steadily for about a year, Danielle saw an ad asking for someone to teach a muscadine wine class in Augusta, GA.
She sent an email sharing her fermentation and teaching experience and was quickly scheduled to teach her first fermentation class. She didn't tell the organizer at the time, but Danielle had never made muscadine wine in her life.
She immediately ran out and bought some muscadines, found a recipe, and made the wine. The class went great and thus, Fermdamentals was born. At Fermdamentals Danielle teaches the fundamentals of fermentation.
While her blog is still active, it contains very few actual recipes. All of the ferments she has successfully made are contained here. Metheglin is a mead that has been fermented or flavored with herbs or spices. There are many other terms for fermented honey beverages that have been culled from historical references. The Celts had their hefty zythus and less potent corma, the Aryans soma and amrita.
Some historians claim the Greek ambrosia is mead, others that it is a sweet food made with honey. Nectar is more likely the Greek term for mead. Rhodomel is a Roman term used historically to describe a honey drink flavored and scented with rose petals. Morat was used for a melomel made with mulberries. Hydromel has been described alternately as a French term for mead and as the name given to weaker or watered- down meads.
Some mead enthusiasts have adapted, created, and applied a whole host of names to meads created with different ingredients. They can be interesting, in some cases even amusing capsicumel or capsimel, for a mead made with hot peppers. That, however, could go on without end molassocassioconiferamel: a mead made with molasses, cassia [cinnamon], and pine-bough shoots!
Nomenclature has never been anything other than arbitrary in any discipline. Which of these names you choose to adopt is a matter of your own inclination. What you had piqued your interest, and now you want to learn more. Be assured that meadmaking is quite simple, and within the next few pages, this book will teach you everything you need to make your first batch. Thus, thorough coverage of meadmaking must explore not only the broad subject of honey, but a number of other fields as well.
Fear not: You can explore as few or as many as you desire, at your own pace and in your own time. A resurgent interest in mead and meadmaking in recent years has created a boundless frontier for experimentation and research into the possibilities of fermented honey beverages.
Winemakers, homebrewers, and history enthusiasts, particularly those with an interest in the Middle Ages, have taken up the quest for perfection in meadmaking. As they learn and experiment, they stretch the limits of mead tradition. While I value tradition and history more than many, this book strives to move beyond traditional accounts and bring meadmakers a broader, more scientific knowledge of their craft.
Anyone familiar with amateur brewing and winemaking has seen a similar trend in the past decade or so. As these hobbies expanded, so did the amount and quality of information available to amateur practitioners. As a result, people make better product and enjoy it more—and that makes everyone happy.
The advantages of good knowledge and the use of sound technique help make brewers and winemakers proud to serve the fruits of their labors to their friends and relatives. This text strives to bring the same advantages to meadmakers around the globe.
Of all the home beverage fermentation pastimes, meadmaking is by far the easiest and most foolproof. It is forgiving of the forgetful, the busy, and the careless. It can be very inexpensive and indeed requires quite a bit of effort to become pricey. Above all, meadmaking is fun. Finally, perhaps the finest characteristic of mead is that it seems to improve with age almost indefinitely. Such is the joy of having a case of mead tucked safely away in your storage space.
So what do you say we get started on creating your own mead cellar, eh? As a result, much of the readily available equipment is designed for hobbyists making 5 gallons at a time. Rather than buck that trend, I am going to give you directions and commentary designed for making 5 gallons of mead. In some cases, equipment can be smaller, too. Many of the items you need will be found at a home winemaking or homebrewing store in your community.
Check your Yellow Pages for suitable listings and give them a call to see if they carry the items you want, or just stop by for a visit once you have your complete shopping list. The one thing that you may not find at a homebrewing or home winemaking shop is the most important ingredient for mead, namely the honey. For that, you may want to start at your local farm market, where beekeepers often market their wares.
Another option is your gourmet grocer. Honey packaged for grocers is often heated repeatedly so that it can easily pass through heavy filtration. Both of these processes degrade its quality for meadmaking. To compile your shopping list, the first thing you need is a recipe.
For this first recipe, I looked for something not too sweet, not too dry. Finally, I picked a mead that contains all of the ingredients that will normally be included in any mead you make. Thus when you purchase honey, you want to get a good-quality product that will make a nice mead. The best way to determine the quality of the honey is to smell and taste it. Try to pick a honey that you really like. If orange blossom honey is not available, try to find a high-quality alternative from your region.
Tupelo and sourwood are wonderful honeys from the Southeast. Mesquite honey is available in the Southwest.
Raspberry blossom is a wonderful honey from the Northeast and Northwest. Five quarts are what you will need for a medium-bodied, mildly sweet but not too sweet mead. You will also need some yeast nutrient and yeast energizer to get your fermentation off to a good start. Yeast nutrient provides nitrogen. An alternative to yeast energizer is Lalvin Fermaid K, which will provide both the nitrogen and the other micronutrients at the correct dosage rate.
Lalvin recommends adding 5 grams to a 5-gallon batch, which weighs out to about 1. You need a source of nitrogen and a source of micronutrients. For most folks, the easiest way to do that is to buy three 1-gallon jugs of distilled water and put them in the fridge the night before you make mead. Use either bottled or tap water, depending on your preference.
Finally, you will need a nice wine yeast. While some shops may steer you toward liquid yeasts, you are better off starting with dry yeast packets. The dry yeasts are convenient and very easy to use. They come in foil pouches, pretty much like the stuff you use to make bread. I recommend that you buy at least 10 grams of yeast, or two packets. Here are some additional details on each item to help you know what you are looking for.
Stainless steel stockpot. You will need a pot large enough to hold more than a gallon of honey and another gallon or more of water with room to spare for stirring and so you can pour from the pot without risk of spillage. You will also want one with large, sturdy handles that can be firmly gripped, even when wearing kitchen mitts or using hot pads. Usually you can find one at any department store or warehouse outlet at a reasonable cost especially if you watch for sales.
Dairy or kitchen thermometers will perform the task equally well. Glass dairy thermometers float upright in your must, making them easy to read. The drawback is their fragility. More than one batch has been lost to a broken dairy thermometer. As you get more involved with meadmaking, you may want to have two or more thermometers.
This device looks a bit like a floating glass dairy thermometer, but rather than reading temperature, it tells how much sugar is dissolved in a solution. The most common scale of numbers on a hydrometer is known as specific gravity. When this occurs, the hydrometer floats higher in the solution, changing where its scale will be read.
Once the must is prepared, we read its specific gravity before adding the yeast and starting fermentation. The gravity of your must before it ferments is called the original gravity, or O. There are other scales of dissolved sugar concentration, such as Balling, Brix, and Plato.
Plastic fermenter. To use the procedure I recommend for your first mead and other early recipes, you will need a plastic fermentation bucket.
Plastic fermenters come in sizes from 5 to 8 gallons 19 to There is a hole on the top for a fermentation lock as discussed below. Because the plastic fermenter is a cylinder with a large round lid you can remove, it is both easy and safe to work with. Plastic fermenters also make great receptacles for sanitizing such peripherals as the racking cane, hoses, fermentation locks, and rubber stoppers. The downside of plastic bucket-style fermenters are 1 the potential for bacterial growth in their scratched interiors, and 2 their geometry.
The large surface area of the mead that is exposed to air creates a higher risk of oxidation under some circumstances. Glass carboy. Carboys are the large 5- to gallon glass bottles once familiar to everyone as bottled water bottles. These days, plastic is replacing glass in the water cooler business, but the old glass carboys are perfect for making beer, wine, and mead.
The shape and volume of 5-gallon glass carboys are ideal for 5-gallon batches. When filled, they leave a very small surface area of must or mead open to the air, thus reducing the risk of oxidation. They do not scratch easily and so with a little care, will last forever. Remember to be careful with your carboy. Use plastic crates or other handling aids to reduce the risk of dropped or broken carboys. Rubber- coated carboy handles are cheap and convenient, too.
Just remember to use two hands when handling a full carboy. Also, avoid handling one with wet hands, and wear a sturdy pair of shoes, just in case. Fermentation locks. Fermentation locks provide the barrier that prevents contaminating bacteria or wild yeast from entering your fermenter and your mead.
They are simple mechanical devices that allow the carbon dioxide to escape from your actively fermenting mead while sealing out the external environs. They use a liquid, like water or—as I prefer—cheap 80 proof vodka, as a seal. The carbon dioxide produced by the fermentation builds up pressure below the barrier, and eventually the pressure forces the gas to bubble through the fermentation lock. The vodka keeps everything sanitary, but needs refilling more often than water, as alcohol will evaporate more quickly.
Fermentation locks do not need to be expensive or pretty to do the job; the cheapest plastic fermentation lock will work just as well as its blown glass counterpart. This method is even preferable to commercial locks when you are making a large batch or have a particularly vigorous fermentation. Your locks just need to be clean and full of sanitary liquid, and they will do the job.
Drilled rubber stoppers. A drilled rubber stopper is needed to join your fermenter with the fermentation lock. The stopper goes in the fermenter and the fermentation lock into the hole in the stopper. Buy two stoppers, one for your plastic fermenter and one for the carboy. Stoppers No. Siphon hose. Siphon hoses are simply sections of clear, food-grade vinyl tubing. They can be obtained from brewing and winemaking supply stores, but also may be obtained and sometimes at better prices from hardware and home supply stores.
You will need sections about 6 feet long, and should plan on replacing your hoses regularly, probably every six months or so. Racking cane. Siphoning without a racking cane is possible, but difficult. Your siphon hose fits snugly over the end, and the cane is lowered into the mead being racked, to provide you control over siphoning. This allows you to avoid the sediment pack or fruit residue, which will keep the hoses free of blockage and maximize the clarity of the siphoned mead.
Most racking canes come with a formed plastic cap on the bottom to keep the opening off of the sediment at the bottom of your fermenter. You may or may not find the cap helpful. Bleach or sanitizer. Ordinary household bleach unscented that you get at the grocery store will work fine. Otherwise, your home wine or brew shop will most likely offer several alternatives for sanitizing equipment, and you can select and use one of those.
In the meantime, you can read ahead to start thinking about what comes next. The recipe and procedures here will make a medium-sweet, still mead that will highlight the floral character of the honey. We do this to sanitize it, knocking out the many organisms that occur naturally in all food products. Generally, meadmaking is pretty quick, but for this first effort, give yourself a whole morning, afternoon, or evening to get everything done.
Trust me. Read it all. Then get started. Even if it is brand new, a quick wash with dish soap followed by a good rinsing is a good idea. That includes your fermenter, a large and small spoon, thermometer, fermentation locks, stoppers, ladle, and a small 1- to 2-cup dish for your yeast.
When you remove things from this bath, you can rinse them once with cold tap water or simply lay them on clean paper towels to dry until they are needed. If you have selected a different sanitizer, follow the directions provided on the package. Now put the unchilled gallon of water in your stock pot and bring it to a vigorous boil for 10 minutes.
Wearing a kitchen mitt or other protective hand gear, grab your honey containers, and ladle some of the hot water into them until they are about one- third full. Put the lids back on and shake them to dissolve the honey still clinging to the sides and bottom. Be careful to open the jars upright, and use caution to open the lids slowly: The now-heated air in the jar will have expanded. Carefully add that liquid to the pot.
Using your thermometer, get a temperature reading on your must. It may be a little above or below that. You want to keep it there for about 10 minutes before we proceed to the cooling procedure.
Please be very careful when you move this pot of hot honey water around. Again, I speak from experience. This stuff will burn fingers, arms, and feet both efficiently and effectively. And it will make an astounding mess out of your kitchen or laundry room if dropped. With this done, you are ready to add the three gallons of cold water from the refrigerator to the fermenter.
Once you do this, stir the mixture with your sanitized spoon. Place your floating thermometer in the mix or take a temperature reading, so you know where you stand. It has been dormant in a dry package for a while, and you want to get it used to being wet again before you put it to work on the sugar in your mead. Add the yeast and let it sit for 15 minutes to become acclimated to its new environs.
Then, using your small sanitized spoon, stir it thoroughly to suspend the yeast. Give the yeast a quick stir with the small spoon to make sure it is well mixed, and then pour it right into the center of the must in the fermenter. There are other ways to do this —you can use an electric beater if properly cleaned and sanitized first, and I have gone so far as to run a portion of my must through a blender.
Grab your hydrometer, and carefully set it into your must. Spin it to make sure that it is floating freely in the must. It should be between 1. Remove the hydrometer and wash it well before storage. With the stirring done, you can attach the lid to the fermenter.
Ideally this will be someplace out of the way where the mead can reside for several weeks while fermentation runs its course. The basement is a popular choice, if you have one. A nice closet on the cool side of your abode will work just as well. A spare bedroom or a corner of the dining room can serve just as well if that works best for you.
Now, once the must-filled fermenter has found a home, you are ready to affix your fermentation lock and fill it with liquid. One trick on rubber stoppers: A dab of water or glycerin will make the insertion of your fermentation lock into the stopper easier. OK, once you have done this, everything is done except for cleanup of your equipment and your meadmaking area. Get that done, and relax for a bit before reading the next part, which will tell you all about fermentation and racking before getting into the final step of bottling.
The yeast gobble up all the oxygen you stirred in, grab a bunch of the nutrients you added to the must and then reproduce until their numbers are approximately five times what you originally put in the fermenter. Then, assuming all goes well, they begin a robust fermentation of all that sugar that the honey provides. During fermentation, yeast convert sugar into carbon dioxide and alcohol. About two weeks after you first notice the bubbling in your fermentation lock, it will begin to slow down pretty substantially.
Racking Racking is the process of transferring mead from one fermenter or carboy to another. That means putting the carboy on the floor with the fermenter on a chair or a couple of milk crates or some similarly sturdy platform.
When you are ready to go, place a small pan or bucket right next to the empty carboy. Now remove the lid from your full fermenter. With the water running to keep the hose and cane full, lift both ends to the same height, pull them away from the faucet, and fold over the hose end to crimp it. Keeping the hose firmly crimped, put the cane into the full fermenter. Use a clothespin or racking cane clamp to hold the bottom of the cane off the bottom of the fermenter and clear of the yeast cake.
Quickly fill your hydrometer tube before you start to fill the carboy. Crimp the hose, then move the end into the empty carboy. From here gravity will do the work of moving the mead from the fermenter to the carboy.
During racking, you will want to keep an eye on the bottom of the racking cane to keep it from siphoning the yeast and sediment from the bottom of your full fermenter. Make sure that the hose end is below the surface of the liquid in the carboy, to avoid splashing and aerating the liquid. Cease racking when the mead in the cane and hose begin to become cloudy.
Measure the specific gravity with your hydrometer. At this point, your must should have fallen to about 1. If you had a very vigorous fermentation, it may be as low as 1. If it is above that range, though, there is no real need for concern. Patience, yes. Concern, no. Place a fermentation lock on your new fermenter, and return your mead to its cool dry place. I am generally not too impatient about bottling, because mead will take at least six to nine months of aging before it hits peak drinkability.
Bottling is the most satisfying of all of the steps in meadmaking. One of the decisions you will make about every batch of mead is whether to make it sparkling carbonated or still non-carbonated. Commercial meads tend to be still, but one of the beauties of making your own is that you can decide what you want the finished product to be.
You can fill bottles without a filler, too, but you will want one eventually. You could just use a pair of hemostats to clamp off your siphon hose, but that will get old quickly. If you buy a bottle filler early, you will be happier, believe me.
Fillers stop the flow of mead into your bottles as you fill them. They use a valve to cut off the flow, closed either by spring or gravity. Long necked bottle are sturdy vessels, and clear bottle make color and clarity apparent.
Bottle capper. The easiest and most economical closures for bottling are crown caps. The two styles of cappers are bench cappers and lever cappers, also known as two-handled cappers. Bench cappers sit on a bench, table, or floor, and press the cap down onto the bottle using a single handle. Bench cappers are easier to use in general, but only when the bottles you are using are uniform in size. If your bottles are a melange, a lever capper can be quicker.
Lever cappers can be a bit testy when using bottles with larger diameter necks. You need to use care when exerting any amount of force with a glass bottle—breakage wastes mead and can be hazardous. Bottle brush or high-pressure jet bottle washer. One approach is a suitably sized brush. A bottle is placed upside down over the pipe and pressed down to open the valve. A jet of water blasts into the bottle, cleaning or rinsing the bottle quickly and efficiently.
Do not substitute a bottle washer for elbow grease when attacking a case of really dirty bottles, though. No amount of jet pressure will remove the truly grungy stuff from a bottle that was never rinsed and has been sitting, uncared for, for the last seven months. For that job, you will want a bottle brush. A 5-gallon batch of mead will fill about 53 ounce bottles. You can purchase new bottles at the homebrew or home winemaking store, or you can collect empty bottles from a variety of sources for free.
When it comes to beer bottles, not just any bottle will do. Personally, I like to use longneck beer bottles that do not have twistoff cap threads. True longnecks are sturdy bottles. Good American sparkling wine bottles are terrific for meads; they will accept a crown cap and can easily withstand the pressures that build up in a sparkling mead. When it comes to sparkling wine bottles, you need to be aware that European bottles require different-sized crowns from those used on American bottles.
Cases of good sparkling wine bottles can frequently be procured at restaurants and banquet halls. If you phone ahead and ask politely, large numbers of bottles may be available—in their boxes, no less, especially after weekends or big holidays. You can collect beer bottles yourself, if you drink beer.
Make life easy for yourself: Rinse each of the bottles rwo or three times after drinking the beer, and they will be ready to sanitize and use when your mead is ready to bottle. Or make life hard: Leave that little bit of beer in the bottle, and end up having to scrub out 55 nasty, hard, black, furry growths until the wee hours of the morning when you go to bottle. Go ahead. We have all done it. Start by sanitizing all of your bottles in a utility basin or bathtub, using recommended amounts of sanitizer and the warmest water you can tolerate.
Rinse the bottles very thoroughly, and drip dry them as completely as is practical. If you are using wine bottles, you might want to have one smaller bottle on hand for the last bit of mead. If you are bottling on the floor or a workbench, put down a clean, large, old towel over which to work. This will be much appreciated at cleanup time. Arrange all of your bottles there, along with your caps and capper. Move your full fermenter of mead to a position from which to siphon.
To keep the lifting of full fermenters to a minimum, I put the full one on my washing machine, the empty one on a chair or milk crate below, and the bottles on the floor.
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