A Friend in Mead is a Friend Indeed

My adventures in brewing alcohol began with mead - too many viking stories and D&D I guess. My brother-in-law and I decided to begin with a simple mead recipe that only requires a trip to your local supercenter.

Supercenter Orange Metheglin (Spice Mead)

   1 Gallon of Spring Water (room temperature, do not get refrigerated)
   3 pounds of honey – pure unprocessed
   1 bag of balloons big enough to stretch over the mouth of the water jug
   1 package of Fleishmann’s Yeast
   1 box of raisins
   1 Orange
   1 whole clove
   1 half cinnamon stick

Place the honey jar in a bowl of hot water to loosen it up a bit and make it easier to pour. Pour about half of the water into a clean container then slice up your orange into eighths and put the slices, honey, twenty-five raisins, spices and the yeast into the jug. Pour some water back into the jug so the level is a couple of inches from the top then put the cap on it and shake it up well. If you can, you should shake it for a good five minutes. This will aerate the mixture. The yeast really needs lots of oxygen to grow vigorously.

Now poke a pinhole in the top of the balloon, remove the cap from your jug and put the balloon right over the mouth of the jug. Stretch the open end of the balloon right over the jug so that as the gases form inside the jug they will inflate the balloon. Put a rubber band or tape around the neck to keep it firmly in place -if it feels like it might come off. Leave it out on a counter for the first day so you can monitor it.

Somewhere between an hour and twenty-four hours later the balloon will start to inflate. This is a great sign and it means that your yeast is transforming the contents of the jug into wine. Gases are forming inside the jug and are escaping through the pinhole. This setup insures gases escape but no contaminants get into your brew. If the balloon is getting big you may need to poke another hole or two in it. You don’t want it to burst. It would leave your mead open to contamination. Once you are satisfied that the gases are escaping and the balloon is not under unusual stress you can set the jug in a cool dry place like a kitchen cabinet or closet shelf. Check on it every day if you can just to make sure it is ok and the balloon hasn’t popped off.

After two to three weeks the major portion of the ferment will be done and the balloon will be limp. At this point you can taste a little bit to see how it is coming along but it isn’t really a tasty wine at this point. It will need another couple of months to start to get delicious. Over time, as you check on it you will notice that the cloudiness disappears and it slowly clarifies and transforms into wine.

The Orange and the raisins can stay in the mixture for the whole duration but if you want to make the mead a little milder and help it clarify faster you can transfer the liquid into another gallon jug and place the balloon on that one. This would be after the two to three week ferment period has completed. This process is called racking and it will move your mead along nicely.

We transfered the mead to bottles and corked them after about 5 months.  This was to make sure the yeast were all finished so the bottle doesn't explode. We drank a bottle here and there but we noticed about a year later (17-18 months after we started) it really got good. Unfortunalty it was our last bottle so I had to get another batch going.