How to Make Delicious Mead from start to finish

welcome to craftabro let's make some meat [Music] making can be incredibly simple with just a few ingredients you need honey water yeast and some nutrient for your yeast so you can have a healthy fermentation this is the craftabrew Mead making kit and today we're going to walk through what's in the box and how to make your first Mead foreign first off your guide to making Mead this includes your process information and your ingredients also included is a little packet with your airlock and some other gear that gear includes a stopper a three-piece airlock a cap for the end of your siphon tubing and a hose clamp your kit also includes this bag inside this bag are a packet of yeast your no rinse sanitizer solution and two packets of nutrients these are your staggered nutrient additions for your yeast yeast turns sugars like the sugars in this honey into alcohol but sugar isn't enough for the yeast to complete a healthy fermentation so adding nutrients make sure they have the vitamins amino acids and other things that they need in order to complete a healthy fermentation with less risk of off flavors and stalled fermentation more on that in a bit opening up the rest of our kit we find a one gallon jug our tubing for racking a funnel to add things to our jug and racking cane the racking cane is used in conjunction with the siphon tubing to transfer your meat off to its secondary container after fermentation you'll see that in a bit now that we've got everything unpacked let's take a look at the ingredients for this very simple meat recipe starting with our honey here we're going to use clover honey we could also use Wildflower honey or any honey varietal that is accessible to you I'd recommend checking out Orange Blossom honey for something that is really really excellent in a mean and next we have our yeast here we're using d47 d47 is a strong robust clean fermenter and works great at home temperatures below about 70 degrees Fahrenheit it can take a higher ABV Mead to semi-dry and it should give us a lovely product in this Mead and then like mentioned previously we have our staggered nutrient additions the reason we're going to stagger our nutrients instead of giving the Mead all the nutrients right up front is because it helps us avoid temperature spikes that can lead to off flavors in our fermentation see the yeast really like to eat sugar and the yeast really like to eat nitrogen that is accessible to them and this is their nitrogen Source in this Mead because honey doesn't bring any of its own nitrogen with it and yeast need nitrogen to thrive think of it this way giving the yeast honey is like giving a kid candy they love candy but they can't thrive on Candy alone they need their fruits and vegetables and that's kind of what it's like adding nutrient to our Mead we're giving them a more well-balanced diet now our yeast really like this form of nitrogen they're going to go for it so if we put it all in there up front at the beginning of fermentation those yeast are going to gobble it up and that's going to create hotter and hotter fermentation temperatures inside The Jug hotter fermentation temps can lead to off flavors that make your Mead taste bad and can take a long time to age out so by giving our yeast a balanced diet by staggering their nutrient over the course of primary fermentation we avoid that problem so you get better tasting Mead sooner nutrients it's like magic for meat fermentation all right now we're ready to make some meat but first we got to sanitize all of our gear sanitizing is important because it helps ensure that the only microbes inside of our fermentation vessel are the ones that we put in there in this case yeast so we're going to open up our packet of no rinse sanitizer and pour half of it into a container here I'm using a one gallon bucket then we're going to add one gallon of water and tap water would work just fine for this then anything that's going to touch our Mead needs to touch our sanitizer you want to make sure everything that you sanitize spends about 60 seconds in contact with that sanitizer so what I like to do is just sanitize everything and lay it out on a paper towel to dry and since this is a no red sanitizer you don't have to rinse it so just set everything out let it dry a little bit and then we can move on to making some Mead foreign everything's now sanitized let's weigh out some honey and for this recipe we're using two and a half pounds of honey in a one gallon batch for easy reference one cup of honey weighs 12 ounces so if you don't have a fancy scale for this recipe you could use three and one-thirds cup of honey for the one gallon batch all right this is where the fun begins we're gonna mix up a mead let's start by putting half of our water into the carboy then we're gonna put one third of our honey into the carboy then we'll take our sanitized stopper put it in the neck of the carboy take our sanitized thumb place it over the hole and give it a shake once that's dissolved we'll add another third of our honey and that's pretty well mixed all right before we add the rest of our Spring Water we're going to add the day one packet of nutrients so that goes right in and we'll get another shake to dissolve now look for the one gallon marking on your jug We're Gonna Fill The Jug up just above those raised letters and now we're going to give it one final Shake [Music] and now we're at perhaps the most crucial step in our Mead making Adventure pitching our yeast we're gonna have this entire five gram packet into this one gallon jug and the yeast will convert the sugars in our honey water must into alcohol turning it into Mead so just snip off the top pour it right in next before we put our stopper in we're going to make sure the neck of the carboy is nice and clean and dry using a dry paper towel we also want to ensure that our stopper is nice and dry so that way it doesn't slip out of the neck of the carboy the last thing we got to do is put in our three-piece airlock so shove that down inside of your stopper add a little bit of water up to the fill line and then place on the cap the airlock X is a one-way valve the water being the valve the gases generated by fermentation can escape through the airlock but the liquid in the air lock prevents any bad buggies like other yeasts molds even fruit flies from getting in to your Mead you always want to keep an eye on the fill level in your airlock to make sure it doesn't run dry so we'll set a timer for 24 hours and we'll come back and add our next addition of nutrients we're back here on day two and as you can see the meat has really started to kick off there's good fermentation activity nice signs of fermentation in that CO2 coming out of the airlock and of course you can see these ascending bubbles coming up the side of the jug bursting at the top of our Mead it's safe to say that fermentation has successfully and aggressively started so now we need to give it our second nutrient addition how we're going to do that is we're going to divide this packet up into two bowls because we have a day two and day five nutrient addition in this packet so we're going to split it between these bowls Degas our Mead and then add our nutrient that looks pretty even all right before we add our nutrients we need to degas our Mead there's a lot of carbon dioxide suspended in here and adding your nutrients to a fermenting must can cause an explosion I'm talking a literal geyser at the top of your fermenter imagine your nutrient additions like little grains of sand they're bumpy and when CO2 gathers on those bumps it collects into bigger and bigger bubbles that eventually leave the surface of the nutrient and travel to the top that's where your geyser comes from so if we can get as much of the CO2 out of here as possible before adding our nutrients we can avoid having an eruptive experience out of our Carboy and losing some of our meat so here's how to degas we're going to loosen our airlock and we're gonna give it a little bit of a swirl and what you'll see is a lot more bubbles coming up from the bottom and bursting at the surface we want to keep swirling this over and over again until we stop seeing so many bubbles coming to the top so just intermittent swirling here and there for about two minutes until all that activity kind of ceases another great thing about degassing our meat is that carbon dioxide can be kind of toxic to the yeast it creates a sort of inhospitable environment for fermentation so releasing a bunch of that CO2 actually does help improve your fermentation this looks pretty well degassed I know there's still a little bubbles coming up at the top but we're going to see what happens when we add a little bit of our day two nutrients and I'm using a small spoon here and just adding a little bit at a time as you can see that is releasing even more bubbles but because we released so much of the CO2 we're not getting that eruptive effect and it's okay to take your time with this you're not hurting anything by leaving your airlock off for a little bit foreign now we should be able to add the last little bit we have successfully avoided an eruption so time to put our airlock back on and give it one more swirl just to make sure everything is mixed in from the top and then we'll see this meet again in a few days it's day five fermentation is still ongoing with our Mead so we're going to make that final staggered nutrient addition so again we will Degas the Mead and add our nutrients in slowly so we don't get a foam over and then we'll put our meat away for another few weeks and allow fermentation to complete we're planning on bottling this Mead in about 10 days so we're gonna do some aggressive degassing on this to try and get any of the remaining CO2 in suspension to lift up and out of there because it's going to get in the way of us getting a super clear Mead when we go to bottling so we're just gonna loosen the top of the airlock just a bit keeping some pressure on it and we're just going to swirl it we're going to swirl it quite a bit for two to three minutes and yes that's gonna mix some of the stuff that's down here in the bottom up into it but that will all settle back out as it will not be getting carried up and around throughout the Mead with that CO2 that's still kind of trying to gas out so let's give it some Swirls and then we will be back in 10 days to get this thing bottled foreign it's been a full month our Mead's Crystal Clear it's time to get it into bottles we're going to be using swing top bottles here they could also use the bottling kit from craftabrew we mixed up the remainder of our sanitizer we sanitized all the bottles and our gear and we're going to be using this bowl of boiled and cooled water to get our siphon going we're going to be using gravity using a siphon to rack the Mead into these bottles so to do that we'll need our racking cane and that cap that's on the bottom of the racking cane and we're going to need our racking tubing we'll also need our hose clamp and we've put it on the end of our tubing here now we're just going to fill it with this sterile water making sure to close our clamp off in that bowl of water and this takes just a minute to get all the air bubbles out and get it filled okay once that tube is entirely full of water we will attach it to the end of our racking cane and the water vacating the tube is going to start the suction that's going to allow us to pull the Mead out of our jug and into our bottles now we remove our airlock very gently and then we will place our racking cane inside the jug and then for a little bit of reassurance I'm going to use a chip clip to keep my tube from falling all the way inside the jug then we just open our clamp and we'll stop it when the Mead starts flowing right there and then that begins our bottle filling process and we want to get our tube all the way to the bottom so we're filling our bottles from the bottom and there we go four bottles of fresh Mead and you may get a little bit of cloudiness in that last bottle that's the one we like to just you know put in the fridge and drink first if you do put it in the fridge some of that leftover sediment that may have gotten in your bottle will settle out to the bottom and then you can just carefully pour leaving that sediment behind those first three bottles we got are nice and clear looks beautiful now these are ready to drink now I could you know put them back and let them age for a month two months three months a year in a meat like this you can typically expect to improve all the way up to about two to three years of Aging now there are some ways that you can Riff on the recipe included with this kit including you could put fruit or spices into your primary fermentation vessel or consider replacing some or all of your water with a fruit juice or if you decide that you want something a little bit sweeter you can use the craftabrew Mead back sweetening kit to stabilize and back sweeten your Mead to bring some of that sweetness back to it to enhance those honey flavors making Mead or wine or beer at home is not as complicated as it may initially seem and we know that you can make great meat at home so enjoy your craftable Mead making kit and let us know in the comments how your Mead turned out until next time happy Brewing foreign [Music] [Music]

Channel: CraftaBrew

Views: 457,596

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Id: 9L6qQ1_hrrc

Length: 21min 27sec (1287 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 04 2022