Your friendly neighborhood Meadmaker

Hey homebrewers! Thought I'd introduce myself around the forum and talk some mead. I first got into homebrewing by making mead and have been happily engrossed for around 5 years now. I brew beer too, but mostly for something interesting to drink while I make my meads.

I'm a BJCP Mead Judge, have attended every UC Davis mead making course, have won several awards, and am involved with the Mazer Cup in Colorado annually.

Myself and a couple of associates are also in the process of starting a commercial Meadery here in Kansas City as well.

So I thought I'd use this thread as a way to keep ya posted on meads I'm working on, share tips and tricks for making a delicious mead, and as a general heehawery for some of my mead induced tangents.

Hope you'll join in and ask questions/contribute. Here's a few teasers of my set-up because threads without pictures are useless.

 

Welcome to the site. I've always entertained the idea of brewing beer in my stone walled cellar when my farmhouse is finished.

 

It has been FAR too long since I last had any mead... Now I'm craving it! Thanks a lot ​

Also, wish I had the equipment and space to start making some myself. I have a recipie for a pumpkin mead that I've always been itching to try.

 

Send me honey. I need it for my honey IPA. I usually use honey from a friend who doesn't live too far away. But he lost one of the hives.

 

How much do you use per batch?

 

I'd have to look at the recipe. I only tend to make it 1x a year

 

That's still 1x more than I make anything! Let me know, I'm headed out in a couple days to the town with the roadside stand I always buy my honey from. All raw, unfiltered, locally produced, damn good stuff if a bit more crystalline than what most people are used to.

 

NIce, what coatings are on your floor? THere is a large cider/mead place around here called MillStone Cellars. Cool stuff !

 

Local honey is the best.

 

Best of luck to your meadery! I always love to drink it come October - January. However, we only get the bigger manufacturer stuff down here. Occasionally at Ren Fest, someone will bring homemade stuff and it tastes delicious.

 

When I got the house there was bubbling vinyl flooring down there and drywall that had been tap-conned straight into the foundation

Pulled it all up, bleached everything, hit everything with vinegar after that. I acid etched the floors, then primed and painted with sealkrete's epoxy floor sealer. The walls were hit with many layers of Kilz. It was a beast of a project...

 

Fun fact! You can use how fast a honey crystallizes to generally gauge what the varying sugar concentrations are. The higher fructose the honey contains, the slower it will crystallize. The higher glucose it contains, the faster it happens. Glucose and fructose actually taste different from each other and your brain interprets them differently. If you had a 1.001 SG mead, one of a high glucose honey, one of a high fructose honey, the fructose would seem sweeter to you even though they are the same densities.

 

So if I remember correctly then, higher glucose would give you a drier mead on the finished product?

 

All you really need is a bucket and a jug

 

Exactly

 

Oh, I know... And this recipie calls for you to actually ferment the stuff in a pumpkin shell that's been thoroughly cleaned out and sealed with paraffin wax.

 

Well, you know what season is just around the corner.....

Every time I've used pumpkin I prefer to roast it and add it in my secondary. It would be pretty interesting to see how that recipe turns out!

 

The elderberry and aronia berry melomel has just begun! I opted for clean hands as my crush tool. Definitely one of the more entertaining batches I've thrown together! Excited for this mead's future, as it's most certainly handcrafted, small-batch. I gathered the elderberries and grew the Aronia.



Sulfiting the fruit overnight to kill off the wild organisms, before I add the orange blossom honey and water tomorrow and pitch the yeast.