How to Make Mead at HOME- Everything you Need to Make Your First Mead

if you always wanted to make me but thought it was just far too intimidating you need far too much stuff it's just far too complicated well guess what we're gonna break that myth right now and show you a really easy way to make your very first meet [Music] all right to make this mead you're going to need a vessel this vessel used to hold apple juice that's right you can find a one gallon glass fermentation vessel in your very own grocery store we actually got it at publix we bought the fermenter and got a gallon of apple juice for free [Music] you're also going to need honey today we're going to be using orange blossom honey but you can use wildflower honey you can use clover honey you can use pretty much any honey you can find at your grocery store as long as it's really honey some of them are not so much you want to make sure it's genuine honey raw hon raw honey is a great way to go if it says raw or 100 pure if you're in the united states that i think is the nomenclature that they use you will also need a cup of black tea the black tea of your choice and please use black tea don't use green tea don't use ginger tea don't use sassafras tea don't use lavender tea don't use just use black tea for this just use black tea there's a reason why i'm being so animated about that i've been asked a million times can i just use this the reason you use tea in this recipe is not for flavor okay it is merely to add a little bit of mouth feel and complexity to this brew you want the black tea that's what's going to give you the best at that just use it trust me also some other some other little things that you can add are i like to add a little bit of a citrus flavor now this is already a citrusy style honey so it makes sense you can use a swath of orange peel lemon peel if you want to lime peel if you really want to but be careful lime adds weird flavors to honey sometimes i don't particularly care for it but other people might i am going to be using dried orange peel that we dried ourselves so it's all good it's just little tiny peelings of it and we put it in teas and things like that i'm going to be using some of it in our need today you're also going to need fleischmann's active dry yeast don't have fleischmann's have something else go ahead and give it a try however i will tell you this particular bread yeast will give a more consistent result than most of the others on the market and that is from hundreds if not thousands of pieces of input by our audience and from our own experience now before anybody gets out there and says oh produce good mood okay this is your first mead i don't want you to have to go buy expensive stuff can you do better with wine yeast yes it will probably be better in some ways what's the downside to using bread yeast in a mead well for one it won't what we call flocculate as well what that means is at the end of the fermentation all the stuff falls out and goes to the bottom it doesn't stack as neat when you use bread yeast you'll get little wispies and things do they hurt you no do they actually affect the flavor no in some ways bread yeast can make a superior tasting product to wine east of a similar vintage in some ways bread yeast can make a superior tasting product to wine east of a similar vintage we've done videos on that there's proof and we've tested it time and time again a lot of people are going to hate me for that and i will fight them argue with them red yeast makes a perfectly fine product after all saccharomy saccharomyces cerevisiae is the same yeast all over the place and that is what bread yeast yeast meat yeast whatever you want to call it it's all the same species of yeast they're just bred to do slightly different things get it right there bread [Music] the final ingredient you will need is raisins the most contentious of mead ingredients ever if there was one now there's some myth there's some tradition and just plain old why not in using raisins first i want to be clear raisins are not truly a significant source of nutrition for yeast okay yeast do need some nutrition aside from the honey itself that said they will actually happily produce alcohol the whole time just might not taste so great might need more time to age but it can be just as good however in wine making people use grapes right so the idea is that if grapes produce enough nutrition to make a wine then dried grapes should be good for meat well it's sort of true but sort of not you know that's where some of the myth comes in however i am going to be using two ounces you got to use a significant amount this is not like five raisins thrown into a thing this is about 50 or 100 it might have been like 150 raisins i don't know i didn't actually count the raisins i counted the amount two ounces why'd i use two ounces because four ounces looked like too much but i really wanted to use four ounces because i thought it would be better there is a little bit of nutrition in these guys not a lot there's a little bit of sugar in these guys too but what there also is is flavor and tannins now tannins are going to come from the tea as well they are a different kind of tannins this will add a little bit of complexity a little bit of color and a little bit of extra flavor to this meat a richness and a depth that would be absent with their absence so as much as this is a simple need there's a lot of complex things going on here and i just want to make it clear that once you see how we do this this is super easy and before anybody says you talk too much i would rather you understand what we're doing than just go throw this in throw this in and you're done no i want you to understand it because if you want to get into this hobby this is a great starting point but i want you to understand what you're getting into and what you're actually doing and why that way when you do go further in this hobby you actually understand a little bit better of what's going on the final ingredient you will need is water and the most important part of that water is that it's non-chlorinated and it's off camera it's over there i'll get it when we need it the table's getting kind of full but it's water yes as she said you want non-chlorinated we do use filtered tap water which has all the chlorine stuff removed if you cannot find anything like that or your tap water tastes like you know a swimming pool i would buy filtered water any filtered waters can be fine try not to use distilled water that has all the minerals and nutrients removed from it probably not the best thing for making mead with but anyway let's get started you'll also probably want to scale they tend to be helpful we are going to be doing things in mostly imperial units today simply because that's what we have and that's what most of our stuff is made of so i'm very sorry but first thing i want to do is try to jam all of those raisins into this bottle so we're actually going to take that off the scale first i just thought of that okay i can change my mind it can happen all right what we're going to do is put that funnel on there though one thing we forgot to mention is you might want to chopstick brian did chop these oh yeah these are chopped up pretty fine because that's another thing a lot of people say oh raisins don't work well here's the thing if the yeast can't really get to the nutrients inside them then no they're not going to so i like to chop them up a bit and you know what if it doesn't make it doesn't actually do anything it makes me feel better it increases their surface area and it makes them easier to get into here yep easier not easy this is probably the most frustrating and time-consuming portion of the entire making of this mead if someone has a better way please do it i don't normally do it like this in all honesty i don't use raisins in a lot of my meads anymore because we do put other things in them so we don't we don't need the extras we already have the flavor and we already have the tannins one thing we haven't really spoken about much is sanitation and it's really important that you wash all these things well and use something like a star sand or some kind of cleaner if you really can't do that boiling them just like you would for canning preservation will work just fine all of our stuff has been sanitized in the red bucket of sanitization [Music] including the funnel the the fermenter everything this wasn't because well you know what it was boiling but these which we're going to use to get a reading an optional step but one i highly recommend if this is your very very first mate and you owe none of the gear don't bother about the the hydrometer or anything like that yet we'll get to that another time at this point the order of events is important for a couple of reasons if i put the yeast in now and then poured hot tea on top of it i could kill my yeast if i pour water in now and then try putting honey in honey will be stuck in my funnel so it's very important to do things in this order i'm going to take this and put it on my scale totally obfuscating my face then i'm going to put in my honey oh look at that brand new bottle and like we said this is an orange blossom honey you could use clover you could use wildflower whatever you like i wouldn't go with something like buckwheat or anything really heavy for my first mead those are harder flavors to work with so you might not actually really like the end product best to use something a little more neutral a little more generic so i'm going to use three pounds of this honey which is about 1.6 kilograms okay three pounds of honey is in there now many of you who are getting into this probably realize that the fermentables the honey that you put in there is what gauges how much alcohol you have well your yeast does too so do me a favor please for this one recipe don't be tempted to put in more honey than what i suggested i put in a lot of honey for the yeast that we're using it's going to create about 12 alcohol if you want to have more alcohol drink two glasses honey is very thick very sticky stuff if you didn't heat the bottle ahead of time like i didn't you probably have a whole ton of honey up in this funnel but it's been weighed so it needs to get into your brew an easy way i'm going to take this tea right here and i'm just going to hold the edge of the tea bag so it doesn't fall in even though it wouldn't matter all that much and this is still hot it's been steeping for oh maybe 10 minutes just as long as we've been talking through this video and i'm just going to drizzle it down the sides rinsing it off melting it down that gets out most of it at this point we'll try to jam some of these guys if you have fresh lemon peel or orange peel or whatever you happen to be using you could probably do this a lot easier probably using if i was using fresh it might be like i don't know a quarter of an orange half an orange worth of peel and some people will say it doesn't do anything i think it adds just that little extra something that's difficult to determine but if it wasn't there you might miss it we used about that much in another mead and it actually gave hints of orange months down the months down the line it was wonderful okay all right so now that we've got most everything in there the last thing is the water now if i put all the water in it'll be hard to mix this up so i'm going to put half the water in right now to about there i'll put my funnel in with the water for the moment because it's okay i have what i call my thumb saver bung what this is is a solid stopper if you don't have one it's okay you can use the cap that that came with this you can you know whatever you got to do you want to just put something in there so that it keeps it from coming out and then you shake the bejesus out of it what do i mean by shake the bejesus out of it what i mean is get all that stuff mixed together and as you're doing that you're adding oxygen into that must which is necessary for the yeast in the very beginning of fermentation after a couple weeks you do not want to introduce more oxygen a very simple rule of thumb for shaking in honey into meat if you think you're done shake for two more minutes okay now as you look at this does it look like it did before no you are seeing a lighter color due to oxygenation a lot of oxygen got into there that's a good thing we want that now what i'm going to do add more water be careful how much water you put in because you don't want to fill it all the way up into the neck some expansion and some foam will happen from fermentation don't get too greedy go to about here-ish or so just at the shoulder is good for me okay the liquid is to about the shoulder what i would like to do now though is you have an option you can put the yeast in right now and then take a reading or take a reading then put in the yeast either way it doesn't matter because we're using the yeast straight away we're just putting it right in today just because of all the foam and everything going on i think i'm going to do it right out of the bottle i'm going to do it now now when i say take a reading this is that optional step why do we do readings mostly to know how much alcohol we're going to get where it is how what are what is the gravity it's a density of sugars to water what what gravity means is way too much for this video we actually have another video explaining that but it talks about how to know how much fermentation has occurred and at the end of fermentation that reading is actually more important because that will tell you is your is your meat done is it stuck is it dry is it sweet it gives you an idea in a numerical value of what sweetness level you have or what dryness level what do i use for readings a turkey baster also known as a poor man's wine thief nothing wrong with this this does the same job as those really expensive stainless and glass ones for like uh i don't know pennies on the dollar a hydrometer which is made for doing this exact thing it's a triple scale do not get confused with an alcohol meter some people have done that it's not the right thing and i'm just using a plain old graduated cylinder all in all the equipment that we have here could be bought for 30 bucks i mean it's not that expensive and hey you get a gallon of free apple juice that can be made into cider one thing that's important once you add more water in make sure you shake it up again just to make sure that it's completely homogenous throughout on our reading i got a 1.110 original gravity now what does that really mean well each pound of honey that you add into a gallon of must is about .035 specific gravity if you do not understand the specific gravity scale at all we do have videos on that it's far too much for me to go into this video here because this is supposed to be simple some people will tell you don't do this i'm going to disagree with those people because everything that we did here has been sanitized everything is clean there's absolutely no reason to waste that little bit of must just no reason at all now we move on to the most contentious portion of this video a lot of people tell will tell you that you cannot use bread yeast and that comes from there's a whole elitism in mead making and in brewing in general and i don't agree with it and it makes me a little bit of an outlier but you know what i don't care i've made a lot of good meat a lot of great wines and a lot of ciders and beers with bread yeast this exact one fleischmann's i think a lot of the myth comes from there are some bread yeast that are not good to brew with i don't actually know what they are but i know that some of the red star ones can be anywhere from 3 to fifteen or sixteen percent depending on the brew depending on the batch of product that you got but our rule when we're coming up with this recipe was things that you can find in your grocery store we know you can get bread yeast in your grocery store or wine east you probably cannot right and i used this one because it's the one that was in my grocery store i use it for baking bread and i started out all my brewing with it works just fine we're going to use a teaspoon today and the exact amount isn't critical don't get crazy if you use a little bit over a little bit under i'm just going to dump it right in now we used a dry funnel because this is a big sticky wet mess right now and that way i used to swim boom right in i'm just going to give this a swirl used to hydrate yeast all the time which means to put it in water and let it bloom i don't do that anymore because i don't feel that it's necessary and manufacturers of the yeast have said we've kind of already done that for you not necessary at this point you now have what is called a must for mead okay there's nothing else that you need to add to this there's nothing else you really need to do it except put some sort of a cap on there now if you do not have a bung in an airlock and don't want to buy one yet you can just use the cap that came with this and here's what you do we have actually thrown that cap away because we don't use them but here is what you do you put it on tight loosen it just a little bit until it'll rattle ever so slightly on that that will allow gases to escape if you put it on too tight it will blow up i am not even kidding it will blow up flying glass not a good thing never mind the sticky mess that you have to clean up afterwards if you put it on too loose it is possible that bugs could get in so find that happy medium where it's just slightly slightly movable you should be fine okay if you really get nervous about it every day just give it a little loosen and put it back you should be just fine if you are willing to spend a couple of bucks for this upgrade that we're going to show you next then by all means do so by the way i highly recommend this upgrade okay that upgrade is this it is a rubber stopper with an air lock all together a few dollars at a brew store or through amazon we do have links below for some of the stuff if you feel enterprising and want to try it out to use it very simple stick it in there and that's it we also put it yeah too it's halfway marked there's a little indicator there with sanitization liquid you don't want to use just water and you don't want to use rubbing alcohol please do not do that if you don't have sanitization liquid then you can just use a neutral spirit like vodka if you have a particular scotch that you just don't like that's what i do okay what to do with this next this is going to go sit somewhere in a room temperature you know between 65 and 75 degrees fahrenheit the celsius will be here because i just don't know it off the top of my head relatively dark place like you don't want to put it in a windowsill you don't want light on it all the time even on even natural light or even artificial light not the best for it will it hurt it directly probably not but you know what better safe than sorry a bathtub is a great place to keep it you don't want it too cold you don't want it too hot either that will alter the way the fermentation takes place and change the characteristics of what the yeast will give in flavor that's important we don't make this just to make alcohol we make this to taste good so give it everything that you can make it as easy as possible being that this is your first meat i know you don't have all this extra stuff and you've never done this and this is a scary thing and it's okay because this is done now it just has to sit for a few weeks when i say a few weeks give it a month five weeks six weeks there's absolutely no harm for sitting longer however if you try drinking this in two weeks you just might end up with a little bit of bloat and gas and other uncomfortable issues yeah however it's not actually dangerous okay so what to expect while it's fermenting you will see this foam go up it might stick to the top here it might get all brown and crusty you will see bubbles coming up the sides if you if you don't see any of that in the first four days add more yeast a different yeast probably because the yeast you used was probably dead because you haven't make bread in about a year and a half and it's still sitting in your fridge you will if you used an airlock you will see activity in here and that's a sign that fermentation is starting to occur it should be the side closest to this tube should be low and the side furthest away should be high because the water is pushing through kind of like an s trap in your sink um other things to look for if you see very oddly colored things which is highly unlikely green blue things with hair throw it away just dump it all out boil everything bleach everything if you have to that's bad in all my years of brewing i've never seen it so don't even really worry i just wanted to get that little safety reminder out there for you if you see white little blobs or off-white little blobs on the top it's probably just yeast rafts which is normal and common and nothing to worry about what you want to do if you do see that to know if it's yeast rafts or mold give it a shake don't take the airlock out just shake it all up real good and if they go away and don't come back it was east rafts if it comes back it could be mold but it could also be geese wraps okay so that is the basics of this and that would lead us on to the next step okay so we're 15 days in we have activity in our airlock we have little bubbles coming up we have our uh orange peel and raisins are floating on the top and we have some stuff on the bottom all of these things are completely normal and expected all right so as you can see here's the airlock it's going you know we don't really count the seconds or anything like that but it is moving you can certainly see that something's something is happening all right so here's the side view where you can see the floating raisins the orange peel and some of those bubbles across the top this one's not super super active but i can still see tiny bubbles coming up which tells me it's still working and now as we move towards the bottom you can see all that leaf buildup in the bottom there that's really important that's the uh the yeast falling out of suspension things like that various proteins and things falling out of the meat so what have we done so far not a whole lot but brian is going to show you what he has been done and that's the only thing that we've done other than add this rubber band sometimes the bungs don't want to stay in these repurposed jars and you need a little extra help so we just basically we have this bung that's just a half a size too big yeah so we just looped a rubber band around it and looped it onto this handle so it keeps the pressure so it won't pop out now some things to watch for since this is your first time making meat if you see brown bubbling and stuff that came up and it left uh what's called a croissant left a mark across the bottle perfectly normal perfectly fine don't even worry about it what that is is the foaming process of an active fermentation the little foam bits have dried have dried along the inside of the glass and left that line that's perfectly normal your your fruit your raisins and your oranges will float no worries if you see a little bit of white specks here and there it's probably yeast rafts not mold don't worry the next step will actually get rid of that along the bottom you're gonna see various stuff you'll see some of your raisins you'll see some powdery stuff some film some all kinds of stuff that's perfectly normal nothing to worry about at all if you can if you cannot see through it and it's very murky that is really normal at this stage okay what i'm going to do next is what i call the swirl method okay really really simple i leave the airlock on pick it up put a hand on the bottom and swirl it when you do this it's going to degas so a lot of gas is going to come out that airlock sometimes it'll want to overflow so i usually do a little bit and stop then a little bit then stop because it's producing a lot of co2 in here now remember those little yeast raft things i was talking about if it was mold which i doubt it if you're in an active fermentation very highly unlikely mold needs oxygen there's no oxygen in here so if it's yeast rafts they'll mix in and disappear if it was mold it'll come right back in a couple of days so that's something you can watch out for if it keeps coming back it could be mold and if it's not white like if it's brown and green and blue yeah you probably want to dump that but i just give it a swirl and what i'm trying to do is get all this stuff at the bottom active okay the side effect is it degasses even though that's important too degassing takes all their waste away so the yeast can get back to work makes a little easier for them okay but moving all that sediment around is a really good idea because it just if there was some dormant yeast that was maybe stuck behind other proteins and things and it couldn't get to stuff now you just reactivated everything letting it go even further another good reason why to do the swirl is in this particular brew we have some solids the raisins and the lemon peel and because they have floated to the top swirling keeps all that stuff moist and wet so bad things probably won't happen right but just so you're aware bad things probably won't happen anyway because most of the bad things need an oxygen environment this is a non-oxygenated environment it's all co2 all that gas is being forced out co2 is heavier than oxygen so the oxygen gets forced out if there was any co2 is filling this making it the perfect environment for our yeast and a much less than perfect environment for all the stuff that might want to drink this so what happens next oh i'm gonna put this back down on the floor it's gonna ferment for another couple of weeks and you'll see an update as always guys thanks for watching have a great day bye

Channel: City Steading Brews

Views: 731,192

Keywords: how to make mead, make your first mead, easy mead, homemade mead, how to make mead at home, make a simple mead, make easy mead, how to amke your first mead

Id: UdqRhDXKLjA

Length: 25min 37sec (1537 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 26 2020