How to Make Fruit Flavored Mead

[Music] hello friends hiding here from rain country god is good all the time and I had several requests that people wanted me to show how to make Mead and so since I have a lot of older honey that I'm trying to work through I figured I'd go ahead and get some started and show you how I do it because it's actually very very simple and I'll be talking to you through a few things that I may not show in this video and any other questions you may have on making wine of any kind you can go check out my winemaking playlist or the last video I did where I answered several questions and I will link to both of those down below so when you're making Mead really all you need are two things honey and water you can actually do it without having any kind of fermentation started but to speed up the process it is a good idea to have some type of ferment starter now some people will use a wine yeast some people will use a bread yeast even but the cheapest method which I also think helps lend to the flavor of the meat is to use your own fermentation starter whichever kind that it is now I have several videos on the fermentation starter how to make it how to use it I will go ahead and link to my most in-depth one I know it's long but I answer a lot of questions in that but it is a simple process I will link to that down below and you can make it with any fruit or even ginger root that you have on hand I always use some kind of fruit whether it be dehydrated freeze dried or fresh those are the best ones to use in making a fermentation starter and so in here I actually have a combination of blackberries that have been frozen and because frozen works too I just find I get the best results if I combine it with dehydrated freeze dried or fresh and some DEET and freeze dried raspberries and I'll actually be adding a few more raspberries to this when I strain it out then the other thing is I have always made flavored meat so I'll be inserting a few pictures here showing you some of the different flavors and types that I've made through the years and this is actually the first time I've made Mead in quite a few years but it is actually easier than making a just a regular wine out of juice now as you can see one thing about honey though it has an indefinite shelf life it can turn dark and the flavor can change over the years if it sits and so I've been restocking my honey supply and trying to work through this old stuff and that's why this is so dark it's actually quite a few years old but well it still has a nice flavor and it will still be great for making me now back there in the corner I'll go ahead and put a picture of that right here too so you can see it better is the meat that I started yesterday and that is a raspberry made now all of the Meads I've made in the past were made with fresh fruits of some kind that I pureed up and add it into the mixture or as in the case of my orange spice Mead I'd like to slice the oranges up rather small enough that they can fit into the regular gallon jug lid and then toss in some clothes and some cinnamon sticks and that made a really good mean you're just adding flavor to it unlike wine you're not actually using a straight juice to make Mead the mead is based off the honey it's the sugars in the honey that's gonna ferment and yes honey ferments excellently raw honey so even though honey is a natural antibiotic it does not kill off the healthy bacteria that causes things to ferment and it can be used to make a very good fermentation starter I've done that before too so what I have here are three cups of honey so for every gallon of mead you're gonna make you need 3 cups of honey one gallon sized bucket of honey like I have here this is the size you need to make a five gallon carboy so it's actually honey as weighed in pounds this would be about 12 pounds of honey even though it's a one gallon sized bucket so one of those two a five gallon carboy is what you need but I always like making mine in one go sizes because I like doing I like doing smaller batches so I can play with different flavors and different fruits so over there that as I said is raspberry and I actually made that one using freeze-dried raspberries and today the one I'll be doing is pineapple and mango again using freeze-dried fruits from Mother Earth products since that's my favorite place to buy freeze-dried items or or even dehydrated things that I don't grow as well or I just like to have more of and stop because we use a lot even if we grow them well like potatoes the first thing you want to do is I recommend putting your honey in a large the largest container you have up to a gallon this is an eighth cup batter Bowl and this works really good for this I actually used to do this in the plastic coconut oil buckets but I found I like doing it in the in the glass better and so what I'm going to do is add a couple of cups of water to this maybe about three cups of water and you want to make sure that your water is dechlorinated if you're using tap water we use filtered rain water that we collect here on our own property but any good healthy water you can come across that doesn't have chlorine in it but if it does have chlorine in it you'll need to dechlorinate it because that can slow down or even prevent a good ferment so basically you can do this without heating it and keep your honey raw it just takes a little longer you'll just want to keep stirring your honey especially if it's thickened up and kind of crystallized a bit like this house but even without putting it on a heat source at all the honey will dissolve in the water if you want to speed up the process a little bit then put it on a very low heat and do not allow it to get hot because it's best to keep that honey raw just let it get to maybe 85 degrees tops warm enough that you can dissolve that honey in there I'm going to go ahead and put it on a heat source for on a very low heat source and I'm gonna let that dissolve in there and then when it's done I'll be back and show you what I do next okay this is mostly dissolved I still have a you crystals in there in fact this is still rather cool I didn't even heat it that much I just kept stirring that and that will do pretty good at keep blending it in really good so you again you can get away without having to heat it at all which is nice because if you get it too hot not only will it destroy the benefits of the honey it means you're gonna have to wait for it to cool down before you can add your fermentation starter so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go ahead and put my fermentation starter in here and I need for one gallon I need one cup so if you're going to make a five gallon carboy then you're gonna need five cups of your fermentation starter so you're gonna want to have probably a half gallon of fermentation starter going I always leave the fruit in my fermentation starter but I don't want to add that to whatever it is I'm adding my starter to so I make sure to strain out that fruit and then it goes right back in the jar then I make sure that I feed my starter gotta get a little sugar in there about a tablespoon or so you can see now I'm using a quart jar instead of just a pint jar and add some water to it and since raspberries tend to disintegrate in there raisins do too over time I'm gonna go ahead and add a few more just to keep that nice raisin flavor going on in or not raisin but tuck raspberry flavor going on there then I'm gonna leave my fermentation starter out until later tonight or early tomorrow morning I want to give it a chance to get bubbly let that sugar in there dissolve and then just get active and lively again you want to make sure you have a good active busy fermentation starter so again making sure if you decided to heat your honey that this is cooled down to room temperature before you add in your starter and then mix that in really well then I go ahead and pour one I've got here in to my jug this would be easier to do in the sink especially if you're short like me but I don't like move my camera around that many times yes this is very dark as a result of that Neola cat all those honey Christmas I'm gonna put those in my blender with the fruit that I'm gonna puree yeah what I'm gonna do is add another cup of water cuz these crystals they will dissolve and I'm gonna take my fruit so I've got some free straight pineapple I'm gonna put in about it Oh at least a 1/2 cup or so of that and then about another 1/2 cup or so so usually when I do this I'll use up to 3 cups total of the pureed fruit you can do one cup two cups three cups it depends on how strong the flavor you want just keep in mind the more you put in there that's more you're gonna have to filter out later leaving less actual Mead in the jug when you're done or I should say strain out like okay this is my blender and process it up now that doesn't have to be done you can't with when I did the raspberry I just put the raspberries in there I could do the same thing but I decided with this I want to go ahead and process these up in the blender to make more of a puree I think that helps add even more flavor to the need all right now I got this all processed up look how smooth that it go ahead and pour that into the meat mixture and if it wants to clog up there it goes all right now here's where we're gonna add enough water to get that up to about right here you don't want to get it too full don't fill it clear up to the neck at least oh I usually go right up to about here well I got a little carried away put a little more water in there than I meant to but it'll be okay the main thing you have to worry about when it really starts to ferment is it can push up into the neck of the bottle and then up into your airlock or balloon whatever it is you choose to use we're gonna set this inside a cake pan that's gonna get just if it decides to bubble up and over that's gonna protect my counter or at least protect it from running all over the place it will keep it contained and you can see back here I have this one in a cake pan already no it hasn't it's busy in there but it hasn't started bubbling yeah again I just started it yesterday it will take about three days before you actually see any real action helping but it can take as little as 24 hours it just depends on how active your starter already is and other certain variables member you're working with something that is alive and so just like people just like dogs and cats it's all gonna have its own little personality that's how I look at fermented things now I thought about I brought out the mother earth products organic strawberries because I was considering going pineapple strawberry I might try that next time but I really decided I wanted this one to be pineapple mango and give that a try cuz I did make pineapple Mead before out of fresh pineapple but I've never been made mango or a pineapple mango blend so I think this will be really tasty two options for an airlock can be an old tried-and-true method a lot of people use is a balloon you would stretch the balloon over this is an old balloon so it's I'm using this only as an example and I see it's already got a hole in it if you choose to do this you're going to want to put a very tight fitting rubber band or tie around this because as this starts to ferment what will happen is will fill up that balloon and the balloon itself may not stay in place it can go shooting off when I made my first couple batches of Mead I did use the balloon method because I didn't have a proper airlock now the reason I stopped using the balloon method is that it can add a latex flavor to your wine to your Mead and it's nasty so you don't want to do that it may not always happen it's gonna depend especially if it bubbles up and goes up inside the balloon and then it's definitely gonna take on that flavor and I had that happen with a strawberry one I made one time and it was it was pretty gross so an airlock is what I recommend there's two different shapes I have the S shape airlock I will go ahead and link to both styles so you can check them out for yourself I'm used to the air the S shape because it's the one I've always had and always used and you can usually buy this as a set where you get the the cork the drilled cork that fits into the one gallon jug or the one that fits into the five gallon carboys so you got to make sure the size six is what goes into the one gallon and I like keeping it simple and doing a gallon at a time so I can control each individual batch and if one like that strawberry one that turned out pretty gross if one goes to waste it's not a whole carboy full it's not five gallons it's only one so I'd rather throw out one gallon then a whole five gallon carboy now basically what you're gonna do and this is what makes this one so easy you don't have to add any more honey or sugar to this you simply allow it to sit for 30 days or until like I said in a few days this is going to start to bubble and I'll put a little clip right here about what it should look like in a few days that about the speed that it should be bubbling and then it's gonna do that for about thirty days again you're working with something that is alive there's a lot of variables that can change the time but roughly you're looking at about 30 days it can take a couple more weeks in that but basically you'll know when your meat is done when you stop seeing activity in your airlock so when this goes back to being level because you fill this up so your water the water is level on both sides and then the pressure from the gas is building up in here it's going to push this down and up and then all your water will be on this side now what this does is it prevents the gases in here the bacteria and yeast are turning the sugars into alcohol and that process is creating gases and you want those gases to come up or you are you're gonna blow up your bottles I've heard about this happening to people that didn't know better and just put a tight-fitting lid thinking they were making wine which they were but the gas is built up and actually blew up all the bottles so what that does is it allows the gasses to leave without allowing oxygen to get in because if oxygen gets in then it's going to turn this to vinegar in 30 days rather than have it stay wine so that is why you have to have some kind of airlock the balloon works similarly believe it or not because balloons are permeable so the gases can come out of the balloons that's like helium balloons after a while they start to deflate the gases will will come out without keeping so much oxygen from getting in I still think an airlock is a much better method all the way around so I recommend you get these they're not very expensive I think for a few dollars you can get one of these for a few dollars you can get a set of three for maybe ten or something it's hard to say prices keep changing lately things have just been going up crazy up and down up and down but anyway I'll link to what I can find that I think is the best deal I like to have several of these because back when I was making wine a lot I used to have meat a lot is to have as many as five or six of these going at it at a time all in different flavors now I also like to put hand for shaping under there so I can slide that without it scratching up my counter so much and so I'm just going to leave that by tomorrow within the next couple of days these should both be bubbling really well pay attention especially when you're doing anything where you're adding fruit if you're making a plain Mead this wouldn't be a problem but whenever you're adding a fruit puree the bubbling will can push that puree that's what gets pushed up into the neck and then possibly up into your airlock and if you don't check that daily and make sure that's not happening and it's usually for a short period of time like for a few days before that finally calms down enough that it's not doing that then what can happen is your airlock can clog up and then it will blow the air lock and the bung off of there and you'll have a mess so you don't want that to happen so you can't entirely forget about it you do want to keep checking them just look at them daily to make sure that's not happening but no need to add anything more after this point then once it is all done what you're gonna do especially if you've added puree to yours like I did you want to have like a one gallon container let's say a bucket like this and they're gonna need a strainer and a piece of cloth a clean cotton cloth or cheesecloth will work either one some people use old pillowcases that they wash up this is actually an old sheet nice and clean and then you're gonna put this over whatever receptacle you're gonna catch us in and you're gonna strain all that fruit and stuff out you'll want cloth because it that fruit even if you put in whole fruit it's still gonna break up into little tiny make a pulp and so you want to get as much of that out if you want to fairly clear meet a lot of people will drink a cloudy Mead it's not gonna hurt you it's all good it just depends on what you're wanting then after that you'll put it back in your jug let it sit for another day and then usually once a day for a few days I will wrap it to get a clearer just to make it clear that when you're racking it that's when you're siphoning it out pulling the liquid off the top leaving the sediments at the bottom so you wait until you've got a good sediment layer before you rock it now I do have a video showing how to do that in my winemaking playlist so make sure you go to the last video in that playlist I think it's the fourth one where I show how I rack it and it's an easy process but you do need to have in that one video I talked about you know the wine and meat making some of the supplies you'll need to have and one of those is a long clear tube and that's what you're going to need for racking and just make sure you find one that's food-grade anyway check out that video too to understand all the other things that you may need to have on hand but I say if you're first getting into winemaking meat is the easiest thing to start with especially if you have a lot of honey like I have all this honey that I'm trying to work through so I can restock with a fresher apply if you have bees you might have a lot of honey on hand and are trying to think of some other things you can do with it this is just one of the many things now making homemade wine is a little cheaper than making homemade Mead if you have to go out and buy honey because honey is very expensive but if you're growing fruit where you can make your own juice like I did when I made the apple wine I just took all I had we had so many apples last year I made a cider then took my fermentation starter and then turned the apple juice into apple wine and it turned out excellent and but you still have to add sugar to it when you're doing that to get a good wine so even though you're using straight juice it still needs more sugar added to it to get a nice strong wine if that's what you're looking for okay I hope you found this helpful and this gets you on the road to making your own homemade mead and homemade wine don't forget to check out those videos that I will post in the description box down below don't forget to click on show more or that little gray arrow if you're on a smart device in order to see the video links and other things that we will have down below all right well thanks for watching take care and God bless you

Channel: Rain Country

Views: 9,115

Rating: 4.9847717 out of 5

Keywords: traditional, old-ways, Health, Garden, Frugal, Homesteading, Self-Sustainability, Cooking, DIY, Homemade, natural-living, herbs

Id: cZnyG-I5YJI

Length: 21min 8sec (1268 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 22 2020