How many of you make mead? I made my last small batch for Thanksgiving and I've just gotten caught up with life and other hobbies and forgot it existed until I saw this community.
I've been making mead pretty consistently for 4-5 years now. Super fun.
I've got a (planned) quick turnaround strawberry mead currently fermenting that I plan to filter, back sweeten, and add some lemon flavor in to have a strawberry lemonade mead on tap for the summer.
Otherwise I've got probably around 25 gallons aging in the basement, including some weird stuff like tomato mead, lambic mead, and sea water mead.
Feel free to make whatever you'd like, but I see no reason mead posts can't go in homebrewing. I don't make mead, but still would find the posts interesting.
Mead was my gateway drug into home brewing. About two months ago I paid $15 for a learn to make mead class a friend held, and came back with a one gallon carboy of must (4 lbs of honey) into which I tossed some homegrown haskaps and then pitched my yeast.
Before I even racked that off into secondary, I had a 3 gallon carboy holding a melomel made with local wild blueberries. It's taking a slower fermentation path, but when I tasted it at 1.055 SG it was all good.
Since then I've made ginger beer (just bottled) and 3 gallons of cider that's ready to be racked off, as well as several batches of kombucha.
For those of you who have trouble writing things down, if you have an Android iPhone I recommend trying out the Mead Mate app. Free, no ads, just focused on helping you track all the important data and data points. Helps my scattered mind!
Slightly hijacking this to say that if anybody feels like writing a post about mead making along the lines of the beer one, it would help populate that sidebar there yonder.
I've made 3 batches of mead so far. A sweet, a semi-sweet and a dry. My favourite by far was the semi-sweet, and it only took about a month to finish clear and be drinkable!
Right? The first one in the jar, and the blurb blurb of the bubbles just spoke to me. Then it was like well this’ll take awhile, I should just start another!
I normally have a batch or two ready to rack about now, but life has had other plans this year.
Been a while since I last made mead. I need to find me a good source for some honey and fix this. Best I ever managed to make was a blackberry mead, a good while back. Used a whole lot of foraged berries, real flavory and unexpectedly sweet. After the yeast finished fermenting it was still full of sugary goodness so I added champagne yeast and fermented some more. Don't recall the abv I managed to get on it, and being the neanderthal that I am I didn't write it down.
I just started mead brewing about 6ish months ago it seemed easier than brewing beer and wine just didn't have the same appeal. Plus I just really needed a non-tech hobby. 😅
So far LOVING it! My brews have been fermenting super quick (usually about a week but sometimes 2) and have been more than drinkable after a month. :)