Mead

[ivan]

(The following is long and self-indulgent, please forgive.)

Mead predates wine, and was popular enough to cause a honey shortage in medieval Russia (which, in turn, prompted Russians to explore distillation techniques learned from, I believe, Arabian alchemists -- I'll verify this later).

The beauty -- well, one beauty -- of wine is that nature is all set up to do the work. Pick the grapes, bung them in a barrel, wait for the must to stop bubbling, pour it off the stems and bits, drink and be merry. Well, maybe this basic recipe would not produce a satisfactory wine by today's standards, but it was a fine start. And much, still, depends on the grape. A good grape wants to become a good wine. The main function of humans is to not do anything to screw it up.

Modern-day vintners need to control the outcome of fermenation to ensure a consistent product. They need to protect their yearly investment in grapes. Potentially, one bad yeast strain could cost millions. So, after grapes are picked, they are subjected to all sorts of indignities in order to kill rogue yeasts, introduce politically correct yeast strains, induce secondary or tertiary fermentations on schedule, etc., etc. I don't mean to cast wine producers as villains -- on the contrary, I think most vintners are sent to us by heaven. But the scientific approach to wine making irritates me.

However, the most egregiously scientific wine producers are like vegan hippy luddites compared to home winemakers. That's where the chemistry sets get broken out. Every aspect of wine has been chemically analyzed by someone, and that aspect is available in powder form. I was recently (and rightly) called on the homebrewer carpet for making "beer soup", which means I added a can of malt extract to water to make (a very passable) ale. Well, that can of extract had nothing but barley, hops and sugar. You would be horrified to learn what home winemakers voluntarily and knowingly add to their otherwise innocent grape juice.

Some years ago, my co-conspirator and I ventured into home wine-making. We trod carefully at first, dutifully sulfiting most of the grapes we picked and adding clean yeast. That was the extent of the adulteration, and the product was more than passable a year later. With increasing confidence, every year we reserved a portion of the grapes for natural fermentation. The wine from the natural batches was strong, flavorful, tasting greatly of the original grape -- it was good wine. It's all been drunk now.

We missed the harvest this year, so our wine making ventures will now wait until next fall, when they will resume in earnest.

In the mean time, I'm experimenting with mead. It's a modest experiment, only 3 gallons to start with. Six pounds of honey dissolved in a half-gallon of water, heated, but not boiled, then added to enough water to make 3 gallons. To that I added Champagne yeast.

That's it.

From what I have read, a good dry mead can be as rewarding as any wine, and takes as long or longer to develop. Some mead makers allow 2 or 3 years of very slow fermentation before bottling, and then, they claim, the bottled mead will continue to develop favorably for as long as 100 years.

As with grapes, much depends on the honey used. If I have any kind of success with this batch, I will have to find a source of local inexpensive fresh honey. Then the mead-making will begin in earnest, and will become more significant to me, rooted in my area, and, possibly, fermentable by its naturally-occuring yeasts.

We'll see.

If any eGulletarians out there have made wine or mead, please post here. Also, please don't take offense at my remarks about the chemistry sets -- instead, let's have a nice argument about it!

[Nick]

I've never made mead, but many years ago when I was home brewing a friend of mine suggested mead and had looked into it. His impression was that it would have to stay in the bottle many years - like twenty. As it was it was hard to let the homebrew wait six weeks. Patience, patience! How we lacked it. We could have started drinking the mead ten years ago.

[Varmint]

I know little to nothing about mead, but I recall one meal at Gramercy Tavern with Fat Guy where they served us mead. We were quite startled but pleasantly surprise with how well it went with the food. Damn, I just wish I could recall the details of the mead (and the food that they paired it with). So long ago, so few neurons remaining.

[Schielke]

A few years ago a friend and I decided we wanted to brew something and decided on Mead since at the time we were poor (college) and could not afford fancy equipment. We found a recipe on the internet and started right away.

Frankly, we probably did everything wrong. The mead was overspiced, we used mediocre honey, and bread yeast. It still fermented and we had a hell of a time. The mead tasted fairly bad, mostly due to the overspicing. It was very cloudy at the end and we tried to filter it but had trouble doing so correctly.

Even though we had a poor experience, I would love to try it again with better directions, equipment, and ingredients.

I recently tasted some commercial mead at an Ethiopian restaurant and liked it. It was crisper than I thought and very fruity.

Enjoy your project!

Ben

[ivan]

I will post more about the Mead Project, and also about my experiments with natural fermentation.

I'm sure it's quite obvious that I'm passionate about using as little chemical intervention as possible in making wine. Here is a farsical account of how I "discovered" natural fermentation that I posted to a wine-making newsgroup some time ago: Click here if you wish to read it.

[Stone]

I was recently (and rightly) called on the homebrewer carpet for making "beer soup", which means I added a can of malt extract to water to make (a very passable) ale.

I didn't realize how much pain this off-hand remark has caused. You seem to be questioning the core of your very being. Many fine people create many fine brews from pre-hopped extracts. You should be as proud of your beer as I am of my three-tablespoons-store-bought-curry-plus-meat-plus-coconut-milk-Thai-dinners.

You are Ivan.

[ivan]

I didn't realize how much pain this off-hand remark has caused.  You seem to be questioning the core of your very being.  Many fine people create many fine brews from pre-hopped extracts.  You should be as proud of your beer as I am of my three-tablespoons-store-bought-curry-plus-meat-plus-coconut-milk-Thai-dinners.

You are Ivan.

Yes... yes... It is not the end of the world. When first you spoke those cruel, but true words... "beer soup"... they cut to the quick, and stung. I was brought up short, wrenched from a fool's paradise wherein I enjoyed a false pride, pride for something the world was secretly laughing at. But now, thanks to you and your cleansing, cathartic, khmer rouge-like scourging words of shining truth, I have turned over a new leaf. I have left my family, sold all my worldly posessions, and, clad only in a loincloth and a pair of K-Mart sneakers, have embarked on a mission to seek out the One True HomeBrew. I'm typing this at an Internet Caffe just outside of Soledad. I'll be up in your neck of the woods in a few weeks, just in time for Christmas, so get that spare room dusted. I like my eggs over easy.

I am Ivan.

[ivan]

Mead update:

The mead has been fermenting for 3 weeks now, and the signs are all good. The first two or three days were discouraging: no perceptible activity in the carboy. But when I checked it again at the end of the first week, the mead was fermenting rapidly, bubbling like a recently opened bottle of Champagne. It's been bubbling like that ever since.

I tasted it, and was not surprised to find that it was still quite sweet, but already with a perceptible alcohol content.

As the yeast continues to consume sugars and excrete alcohol (and carbon dioxide), the alcohol level will rise, eventually reaching some maximum level at which the yeast will begin to die, poisoned by the alcohol. This is why one should not use baker's yeast to make wine -- it may die at relatively low levels of alcohol, producing an incomplete fermentation -- a sweet, low-alcohol, and relatively uncomplex wine.

For this mead experiment, I used yeast developed from strains produced in the Champagne region. I chose Champagne yeast because, by some accounts, it produces a clearer mead that does not require artificial clarifying. However, I am wondering whether the yeast will be hardy enough to consume a significant amount of sugar before drowning in the alcohol it produced. The result may be an acceptably alcoholic mead, but one that is rather sweet, whereas my ultimate goal is to produce a mead that is as dry as possible.