Mead Recipe

Well, let me try this for the week end.. Anyways thanks for the post..

Thanks for posting this Eric. It's was quite delicious the other night!

Ok, I've been racking my brain and searching for the recipe for the mead I made, and this is what I came up with. I made a one gallon batch so if you want to try it with a larger batch you'll have to do some math. If you do a search for orange clove mead you'll get the recipe that I based this off of. This is what I had in my cubboard at the time and I just threw it together one night without really following a recipe at all. Other than a failed attempt at some wine last fall, this is the first thing I ever brewed.

-one gallon water
-about 3 and half pounds of clover honey
-one whole orange
-2 cloves
-1 or 2 cinimin stick
-pinch of allspice
-pinch of nutmeg
-1 pack of lalvin 1118 dry champagne yeast
-1 or to teaspoons of yeast nutrient

In your brewpot, dissolve the honey in the water and add the spices. Heat up to just under a boil, probably around 190-200 degrees. DO NOT BOIL HONEY. Processed honey still has a lot of gunk in it from wax solids(like the gunk in the bottom of my bottles from priming with raw honey) and whatever else. While you heat it, these solids will float to the top. Scoop all the foamy crap off the top that you can until its pretty much mostly gone. I think I let it cook the spice in for about twenty minutes while scooping the foam off. Let it cool, pick out the cloves and cinimin sticks and pour it in carboy. Cut the orange, peels and all, into small chunks and put in carboy. Give it a spoonful of yeast nutrient and pitch yeast. I had it in primary for about two weeks, and then I racked into a secondary for about a month before bottling. I used raw honey straight out of the bottle to prime and it left a lot of crap in the bottom of the bottles, so I would recomend mixing it with some water and heating it up and do the skimming technique first.

If you leave it in the carboy long enough mead crashes out pretty well on its own, but I used liquid icing glass for a clearing agent and it worked awesome.

I wish I would have documented it better, but I pretty much just threw some shit together and didn't have any precise measurmeants. For instance, the three and a half pounds, I estimated to be about 2 and a half of those little honey bear bottles.

I know I used only 2 cloves, and that was more than enough. Those things are pretty potent