Easy Blackberry Mead (Honey wine, Melomel)

this is fresh local Wildflower honey and this is blackbery Meade today we're going to turn the honey into the [Music] Meade hello welcome to English country life Welcome to the kitchen our cold Frosty Winters day perfect day for doing some inside jobs and this is one of our most requested videos a lot of people have asked to learn about me making it's something we've been doing for 25 years so here we are today we're going to make blackberry me actually properly that's called Blackberry maml cuz maml is the term for fruit me methin is the term for spiced me I'm just going to call the Meade it's much easier to understand for anyone who doesn't know a Meade is an alcoholic drink made by fermenting honey very traditional dates back centuries and centuries in the UK long before we had our own wine industry long before we had a sugar industry fermented honey was one of the sort of most available drinks and it can occur naturally if you extract honey and it's got slightly high water content it can start to ferment naturally and I suspect in sort of ancient times that where it came from now it is available commercially but not that widely and it's very expensive and honestly when I've tried a lot of the commercial Ms they're not nearly as good as homemade Meats so this is one of the drinks that's really going to pay off if you put some effort into it and make it yourself one thing I'm going to say is it is quite a timec consuming process so it's nothing to be afraid of there's nothing that you can't manage but the one thing I would say is get yourself good quality ingredients particularly the honey any honey will ferment any honey will produce an alcoholic output but if you get a really nice honey you get a really nice Mead and if you're going to put all that effort in what you really want is a really nice me [Music] so I'm going to break this video down into a day-by-day approach I find it easier for people to brew along with the video that way so we're on day one and on day one we're going to start the fermentation in a white lided plastic bucket not in a demi jump the reason for that is that the initial fermentation could be quite violent it can cause froth and foam and that can force its way through the air lock and S of mess up your fermentation not to mention messing up your floor so starting it off in a plastic bucket makes sense you need to sterilize the plastic bucket the cheap and easy way is an 8 cup full of plain unscented household bleach fill it with water leave it 15 minutes rinse it twice if you prefer there are proper proprietary sterilizing agents available for home brewing you can get them from your local home brew shop whichever method you prefer do make sure that you get your bucket [Music] sterile [Music] let's get on with our ingredients I'm going to make a full recipe available in the description down below so don't worry about trying to write everything down what we are going to start with though is 2 kilg of blackberries and I'm using Frozen blackberries that we picked from our fruit cage earlier in the year and each of these boxes when they're picked holds a kilo of black bre and they've been frozen and I defrosted them last night I'm often asked is frozen fruit okay for wine making not only is okay it's often better than fresh if you look in here you can see there's lots of juice come out because when you freeze the black gree they expand that bursts the cell wall when you defrost them they release a lot of the juice and it's releasing the juice is exactly what we need for wine making so frozen fruit absolutely great let's get these into the bucket on top of the blackberries I'm putting 250 g a just ordinary white granulated sugar purpose of the sugar isn't to make it sweet purpose of the sugar is to draw out that juice the next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to take a potato masher and really squish all those fruits into the sugar and the sugar into the fruits break up the structure of those black Brees and really get some juice flowing and the combination of sugar and the mashing is going to get all of that Blackberry flavor into the honey next job we're going to get the zest off a lemon then we're going to get the juice of that [Music] lemon once the sugar draws the juice out of those blackberries and I'll leave that for about an hour we're going to get on with the honey what we need is 1 and 1 12 kilos of really good quality honey and our great friend Andy has produced this for us so this is one and A2 kilos It's a Wonderful semi set honey and it was produced when the bees were working field beans but they were also on uh lime flowers which is the Linden Tree um wonderful flowers interestingly lime flowers have an almost sfic effect if you um make a tea from them so I'm wondering whether this will make me nice and relaxed when it's actually brewed into a me probably not so much they were also on Rose Bay Willow herb and that is the difference when you deal with a real beekeeper they can tell you where the honey came from what kind of flowers the bees were on and it makes an enormous difference the honey honestly if you try for example Heather honey it's wildly different than lots of other forms of Honey very stiff very hard set quite flavorful and it makes a real difference to your me so it's great to know what kind of honey you're working with and if you get an out standing me then use that kind of Honey again so we're going to take our 1 and A2 kilos of honey we're going to put it in a pan and we're going to put in 2 L of water bring it to the boil boil it for about 20 minutes and skim off any foam cuz real honey has other things in it it has tiny amounts of beeswax and pollen and we want to get all of those out in order to create a beautifully clear me at the end of the process it's important to pour that hot honey and water mixture while it's still hot onto the fruit because that heat helps again with drawing out all those wonderful dark rich black bre flavors that we're going to enjoy in the final finished me once it's cool I'm going to add two more things I'm going to add one of these These are little tablets called Campton tablets and I'm going to crush it mix it in what does that do well what it does is it kills off any wild yeast that's present either on the blackberries or in the honey because wild yeast can ferment unpredictably is probably the best way of Buton it they might not ferment very well they might create slightly strange flavors and getting rid of them let's just put in a control yeast that we know is going to work brilliantly to produce meat second thing I'm going to put in is a teaspoon of this this is pecal or pectic enzyme pectin is long strands of apparently polysaccharide fibers found in plant BS I don't know what any of that means but what it is it's the stuff that clumps together and makes your jam set and if you get it in wine it can make your wine cloudy but a teaspoon of this left for 24 hours will break it all down and avoid any risk of that cloudiness so once while it's cool we'll put those two things in we'll leave it for 24 hours and then and only then will begin the [Music] fermentation here we are it's day two so overnight the pectin pectic enzymes broken down any pectin that might have caused Haze or cloudiness in our finished me C tablets killed off any wild yeast so there's nothing in there that's going to cause fermentation now so we're ready to start our primary fermentation and in order to do that what I'm going to do is I'm going to create a Yeast Starter culture and in a glass of room temperature orange juice I'm going to introduce my yeast I'm going to let it rehydrate begin to ferment which will just you'll see it bubbling and you'll see it starting to get going and then we introduce all of that into the Mead and that way it'll get off to a flying start second thing I'm going to do is I'm going to introduce some tanning into the Mead tanin is found in tea it's found in grapes skins and in wine and it's that thing that gives you that sort of thick feeling and it slightly coats your teeth now honey doesn't naturally have any tanning in it and that lack can make me feel a little bit thin when you drink it and if we introduce some tannning it just counteracts that now I'm going to use a small amount of grape tannning which you can buy from Homebrew shops it's in a powdered form if you haven't got any of that you don't want to buy it two or three tablespoons of strong black tea will do exactly the same job and the third thing I'm going to do is get my Mead warm cuz yeast needs warmth to work effectively if it's cold it either stops working or it can even develop off flavors so we want to keep it warm to get this fermentation going and I'm going to use a heat pad to ensure that it's kept warm during the fermentation process and I'll show those to you let's get going let's talk Yeast Starter culture then I've got a glass of room temperature orange juice with a little bit of heads space and I've got a sachche of specialist Mead yeast I'm going to suggest that when you make mead use specialist Mead yeast you can get away with a general purpose wine yeast but it's not ideal I buy specialist Med yeast from a place called cross myof Brew which is in Glasgow cross Mal is an area of glasgo I didn't know what the word meant when I first heard it apparently in Old Scots it means cross my palm as in Cross my palm with silver but cross malof Brew great place and they sell lots and lots of individual yeast I pay full price not sponsored by them but I really like them so this sachet has yeast nutrient added to it and for me particularly straight me you're going to need yeast nutrient honey doesn't have all the nutrients that your yeast needs with fruit Ms you might get away with it but I wouldn't chance it so with all Ms I would suggest either buy a sachet that includes yeast nutrient or if you're buying more general purpose yeast add a teaspoon of yeast nutrient to your starter culture all I'm going to do is open the sachche pour it into the orange juice give it a stir wait 10 or 20 minutes when it gets bubbly I know it's activated and we'll add it to the Mead take a look at that can you see the head on that so now we know our yeast is awake and it's working and it is time to pitch the yeast into our Mead must so I'm going to give a stir just to stir down that [Music] head and here we go into the Mead that's all we need to do this is our grape tanning it's a sort of mid brown powder and a little goes a long way so I'm just using an eighth of a teaspoon of this and I'll sprinkle it into the Mead or rather drop it in in a compressed lump and then I'll give it a stir to break it up that will dissolve into the liquid and just give us that lovely mouth feel let's talk about creating a good environment then for the fermentation this is what I use you can see it is very old it is Stained It's probably over 20 years old this is a heat pad and what I do with that is it just gives off a very gentle heat and I will put my Brewing vessels on top of it and it'll keep them at a nice consistent temperature I'll tuck them away in the dining room or somewhere like that out of the way but in a warm indoors place you can also get things like heat belts if you don't want to use any artificial heating then try to keep your me in a warm place so you know in the living room in somewhere that doesn't get cold like an outbuilding or utility room keep it as as stable a temperature as possible and you'll pay dividends in the quality of your [Music] brain that yeast start cult had 24 hours in the me now and the fermentation really kicked in now when you're fermenting on fruit what happens is the gas bubbles form in the liquid and they sort of get underneath the fruit and lift all the pulp to the surface so you don't see quite the same sort of froth as you would with other liquids but if you can hear it you get a sort of rice krispy snap crackle pops sound as all those little bubbles are bursting continuously we'll give that a few days just to calm down then we'll filter the Mead off the fruit get it into a demig johon and let it complete its secondary [Music] fermentation we fermented now for several days in the bucket it hasn't been that violent of fermentation partly because the temperature is quite cool partly because the Mead itself actually takes a long time to ferment because honey has complex sugars that take yeast longer to break that but it's been kept up to a good enough temperature by using that heat pad and we're absolutely fine it's now not going to foam over the next step then is to get the fruit out of the Mead and the way I do that is take a clean steril demage onum put a big funnel in it and then rest a fine Sie on top of that and using a ladle I'll transfer all the liquid from the bucket into the demig johon now when I've done that I'm going to take a second sterilized demig johon I'm going to move the funnel into the empty demon put the SI on top and then I'm going to put some fine cloth cheesecloth or muslin on top of the C and I'm going to pour the liquid into the second demage on and that extra filtration process will'll get rid of any fine particles and don't try and do it in one step because if you do it in one step what happens is you just block the cloth you will notice that my Demi on is not quite full and I do that deliberately I put about 80% of the liquid in the primary forment that I think I'm going to need and I'll top it up now after I filtered it off cuz I put it all in the beginning I'm guessing a little bit the berries are going to give up some liquid we're never entirely sure quite how much liquid to add so I prefer to put just under the amount I think I'm going to need and top it up at this stage so I get that damage on exactly right without having too much liquid that I might have to throw away the second thing that I'm going to do is put an air loock in but I'm not going to put water in the air loock because this is going to be a long ferment it's going to take 3 to 6 months to finish this ferment and I'm going to put vegetable glycerin in the air lock because that doesn't evaporate the way that water does so there's much less chance of that air loock going dry in a vinegar flly getting in and the third thing I'm going to do is try and preserve that beautifully Rich purple color and over that length of time there's a good chance that sunlight could bleach it out so what I'm going to do is wrap the Demi John in brown paper just to prevent sunlight getting in and lightening that lovely purple color to a sort of pinkish Hue all I'm going to do now is move that demon back on the heat pad I'll let it ferment and I'm going to leave it there for about 3 months because me ferments much more Le than a lot of other country WIS after 3 months what I'll do is I'll rack it off into a clean sterilized secondary Demi jum leaving any sediment behind racking off just means siphoning put it back to fermenting till I'm absolutely confident that all that honey has fermented out turned itself into alcohol and it is quite a long job with made but it's well well worth it I will do a part two video that shows the process of racking off of clearing of filtering and bottling to produce an absolute top range product but if you want to know how to do that I'll put a link up above and that actually is a different kind of countrywide but the process of clearing and bottling is more or less the same if you've enjoyed today's video can you spare us 5 Seconds give us a thumbs up down below if you want to know more about me making please leave us a comment or indeed any other aspect of country living tell us what you want to see and we'll try and make those videos for you that's where this video came from and it's been a long time coming I'm sorry for that but I'm going to make two different me recipes to make up for my slowness and if you want to see those videos and everything else we produce click on subscribe down there hit the Bell next to it it's a totally free service but you get to hear every time we upload a new video for today thanks for joining us come back and see us soon take [Music] care [Music] oh

Channel: English Country Life

Views: 3,332

Keywords: Metheglin, wine, home brew, homebrew, wine making, country, traditional

Id: eMXw82opgzE

Length: 18min 9sec (1089 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 19 2024