How to Make Metheglin Mead - Spiced Metheglin

today spicy methaglin meat brian's new favorite [Music] okay so i made this like two years ago i think it was before we were on city setting maybe it was more than two years ago i don't even really it was just some experimental hey let's put these things together what's even funnier about it is it wasn't even supposed to be a method it was supposed to be something else and i screwed it up i don't remember what i did wrong but i just ended up putting some spices in and said ah what the heck and and did it i think i realized i had messed up once the spices were already in and went yeah whatever well here we are now it's amazing and i'm drinking it our vips actually saw a sort of similar recipe for this i've kind of improved it a little bit and tweaked it just slightly so it's going to be a little bit different but this is meant to be ready to drink shorter than some of our other meats i don't want to have to wait two years to drink more of this so i came up with a way to make it go a little bit faster and you know it's got a couple other tweaks too but anyway what is a methablet right that's probably something you want to know it really is like a medicine meat okay this is like the earliest forms of medicines they took meads or wine or whatever and they added spices and herbs and things to it and it had medicinal value and it actually really does because the one i've been drinking helps my stomach helped with headaches i was sick for like a week and it was really helpful i started drinking that at night instead of whiskey because you know well whiskey when you're sick just it's not a good time sometimes so i started drinking some of this and it changed things i actually felt better i slept better i fell asleep easier so yeah this was good anyway let's get started to do this you're going to need a bunch of stuff i'm going to list them off as we get there some of these are pretty familiar ingredients and then there's a little bit of a surprise in this one um so to get started i'm gonna use orange blossom honey okay so we're using florida honey sweet squeeze orange blossom which we get directly from amazon link in description below but this is a florida honey and it's done by buzzingbee.com and you can meet the beekeeper david brooken if you visit their site okay we're going to use three and a half pounds of this stuff and i didn't warm it up or anything so this might take a couple of minutes to pour out [Music] now we're using orange blossom honey because it's what i used the first time it's what you use the first time but this whole thing and when it comes together it reminds me of the old time christmas oranges i don't know if you guys are familiar with this where they would take an orange and they would decorate it by cramming spices into it like clove and so the combination of the spices with that little hint of orange is just really delightful and that's why we're also going to add something else that brian's gonna get to in a moment first thing i want to add is tea now a lot of people get confused on why we add tea to meat it's not really for flavor at all it does that maybe a touch of nutrition for the for the yeast but really it's for tannins because ultimately there's not a lot that's going to be in this because it's going to add tannins that's that gives you that mouth feel it balances out sweet tart acidic all those things it helps to bring it together so to speak if you watched our video tannins and acids link in the description we talk about the marriage of the three different profiles there is the uh base if you will which is the primary ingredients of your beverage and then there's the tannins and acids and the balance that they play with each other to round out those base notes and give some little punctual accents that make it taste even better she makes it sound so nice now i'm going to add a little bit of water to this because i want to get this to about that level so i can mix it up if i add all the water now there's no way i can stir this so by putting it only halfway i can slosh it around and splash around get some oxygen in there because you need that in the beginning anyway but in order to do this i'm going to need something my spoon of unusual size all right and there we have it so i'm just going to put this in and i'm just stirring it up no big secret here no big mystery i'm stirring honey into water and tea and that's why i'm holding the base because there's a lot of honey in there and i'll spill it it could happen yeah she was talking about the spices and this being like a christmasy thing and i can totally see that it's almost an autumn type of spice flavor and you know it's the middle of august now this will be ready probably around christmas time i'm hoping for i said i want this to be ready sooner than the last time now that's a wide range of variables because the last time it took two years before this was something i really wanted to drink i'd hope to cut that down now could i cut it down to a year hopefully can i cut it down to less than a year i don't really know but i have taken a couple steps to help with that more on that in a little bit [Music] okay i would normally put the spoon back into the tub but i know i'm gonna need it in another couple minutes so i'm just gonna leave it out so at this point i'm gonna add in some of the other ingredients that we're gonna be using and that is some raisins now raisins are going in here but not for the reason that you might think they're not really a lot of nutrition for yeast they do have some but not not a lot you need a lot of raisins like in our raisin wine video that was mostly a spoof people took it seriously but anyway i'm using about 30 raisins just chopped up so they don't swell up into grapes again and they're just gonna go in what do they add they add a little bit of tannin they add a little bit of extra sweetness and they add a little flavor they have this interesting depth that they add to bruise that is is kind of hard to explain but you miss it when it's not there right and in a brew like this the raisin with the orange blossom honey and then the cinnamon stick that i'm putting in the cloves i'm using two whole cloves because clove can overpower yeah it it saying too close we were like oh they're so tiny how about no cloves are big and the one that i've been drinking i just finished a bottle of it last night you can taste the clove but it doesn't overpower it had a lovely balance and that's why i don't want to mess with that another thing that i'm going to be adding is all spice berries now these they just smell of like christmas okay they're whenever i smell a christmas themed potpourri that's what it smells like yeah they're they're in in that sort of thing i said six berries on here some of these are smaller so i probably have like eight here but still not a lot i mean like you know a teaspoon of these things not not a crazy amount on top of that now i'm gonna add in something that we made that we use in quite a few of our brews it seems to work really well it is actually dried orange zest and this is what i alluded to earlier when i was talking about something to pair with the orange blossom honey that we're using this is going to bump up that orange essence just a little bit and you'd be amazed just that little pinch it's about maybe a teaspoon of that orange zest will actually come through you will totally taste this again this adds a little bit of tannin it adds a tiny amount of nutrient but it adds flavor that's why we're using it it also adds a minuscule amount of acid um but not too much and i did talk about this again referencing to that tan in an acid video that citric acid which is in citrus can be problematic adding in primary because what yeast will do to it it'll turn it into the acetic acid acetic acid and the the way i remember acetic acid is from acetobacter which makes vinegar acid has that vinegary taste right and we really don't want that included in this brew but because we didn't have any of the pith with our rind brian was very careful when he peeled it and then we dehydrated it the amount of citric acid in this is so minuscule that we're not worried about that more the essential oils that we were after and so our pyramid of flavor with the base the acid and the tannin we're going more tannic than we are acid and that should give us a great flavor profile now you probably noticed that i used a little bit more honey than usual and also you probably know that cloves all spice berries and cinnamon are all antibacterial anti they kill things that you put them in the yeast or a fungus and that is one of the things that antibacterial and anti living organism things don't like they will actually try to kill the yeast so the yeast are going to struggle just a little bit more so i made it harder on them but i wanted this done faster we upped the honey we put in antibacterials what the heck are we doing to our poor yeast colony oh before i get to that i need more water i don't mean to hold it right in front of your face okay and then mixing it up and now is when the two major changes that we do are coming into play and the first one is you might notice i have in my hand a whole packet of wild in 71 beasts yes we do own them yes somebody said that fairies come into our house and place half packets around as a tribute i thought that was awesome that'd be pretty cool but because i know that the the antibacterial properties and the extra honey is going to make it a little harder i'm using a whole packet today i'm breaking my own rule and this is to prove that there are times that rules are made to be broken okay as much as we like to think of that way think of it kind of like you know the pirates code it's more of a guideline so the reason is because having more in there means they have a better chance of starting up okay so before they get killed off by that antibiotic property it'll actually start up the fermentation first in other words we have a larger colony right from the beginning right giving it a good shot i'm going to mix that in before i put in the last and secret ingredient now this has been something hotly debated that we are against using i want to point something out we are not against using organic nutrients we use them all the time as a matter of fact usually it's in the form of fruits or leaves or twigs or you know cinnamon sticks and seeds but we're not really against the stuff you can buy i just don't normally use it but today yeast hulls i've wanted to experiment with these for a while we bought it a while back and i just haven't found the brew that was right and i wanted to present it in a way that made sense because you guys are used to us being against this stuff and not using it i'm against using the chemical ones like the ones that include dye ammonium phosphate and things like that but the organic one like either even fermato i'm not against the use of that it's basically the same as this it's essentially yeast also so what are yeast good question derek yeast halls are just dead yeast cells okay i said this in another one of our videos that in every packet of yeast that you get that's dry yeast not not wet yeast not the liquid yeast dry yeast a certain amount of that yeast is already dead they are nutrient for the other yeast yeast are cannibals it's just the way they are this is literally just dried up dead yeast okay esau says soylent green oh god you can make yeast holes yourself if you have an abundance of baker's yeast which right now i don't know who has an abundance of baker's yeast taking a half a teaspoon of it or so putting it in a little bit of water and boiling it you kill off the yeast there you go yeast nutrient it's does a body good but for this i'm doing a gallon so i'm just going to use a half teaspoon of this stuff a little goes a long way that's it but again i did that because this yeast has two strikes against it going into the must i didn't want to make it that much harder on it and like i said i wanted to introduce the idea of using an organic style yeast nutrient this stuff is cheap too i mean i think it was like 10 bucks for a pound of it it's going to last me like 20 years now if this was a melamer where we had a bunch of fruit solids in there then we wouldn't see any need to add additional nutrients because we know there's plenty of nitrogen in the fruit solids and that's going to act as a nutrient for the yeast because we don't have anything like that in here we did want to give these a little something to munch on i'll be back in about 20 minutes when i break up all these balls of yeast halls all right that's as mixed as i'm gonna get it some of them are just gonna have to dissolve on their own it's like a mustache save some for later yeah so the one thing we haven't done yet is taking a reading somebody's gonna say why didn't you do that before because it doesn't really matter okay i'm gonna dump it right back in because all this stuff has been sanitized in [Music] so glad we brought that back just saying and taking a reading is easy we're using a hydrometer graduated cylinder and the poor man's blind thief also knows and known as a turkey baster and i'm just going to fill it up take a reading find out where it starts at i'm guessing somewhere between 1.125 and 1.130 mostly because it should be 1.125 if it was really a gallon but this is our wide mouth gallon that we know is a little bit less than a gallon and i didn't fill it all the way a gallon like that so i'm guessing more like 1.130ish this is gonna be fun 1.150 we have only gone that high on one other two other occasions and it didn't end well this is going to be interesting do we want to push it and put a little bit more water in there i think we're going to put a little bit more water in here i don't know how much lower i can really get it but i can try just how greedy do i want to be yeah right about there i would also like to point something out i already see bubbles forming in this i've never seen that happen before but yeah totally they really are so this may be a good illustration for brian and us and i and you to learn why they suggest taking the reading before you add the yeast because we're dry pitching now probably taking the reading before we have the yeast is a better idea before when we were wet pitching another word hydrating these prior we were going to change the readings so that's why we added it in and then took the reading but now that we've changed that system i think we may want to reassociate or rethink that okay adding more water was a good idea it's now 1.138 which is still a little higher than i really wanted but i think we can manage that essentially this is intended to stop at like the 15 mark like um 71b tends to do even though it's a 14 yeast it tends to stop at 15 sometimes higher so this will be on the sweet side but with all those spices in there it balanced out beautifully let me write that number down so we're just going to stick a lid on it put an air lock on it and this is going to sit somewhere relatively warm 70 to 75 degrees fahrenheit and it's gonna sit for probably two weeks before i even look at it because it's a relatively high gravity i don't want to mess with it what i am going to do though is give it a swirl every day when i think of it and a swirl is just this spin it up until everything starts to move you want all those leaves coming up everything gets in this will start bubbling like crazy most likely because you know all it's degassing at the same time so i like to do that for about the first week or two after that i stopped doing that anymore but i don't remove the lid at all during that time okay there's no fruit cap in here there's nothing to worry about those raisins aren't going to be a problem but you should see the airlock start having activity within 12 to 72 hours give it up to like three days if you if you do this and you don't see activity in three days contact us through the channel and i'll help you out more than likely it's a little stuck or your yeast was dead or something like that but let me know and we'll see if we can help you out so we finished filming like an hour ago so we're still on the same day that we made this and derek could notice something unusual an unprecedented event we are one hour in and as you can see that airlock is bubbling and i thought no way it's just got to be temperature differential or something there's a croissant that is proof that it's actually starting up already so maybe there's something to this whole um east hulls thing okay i've been wrong before you know it's happened once or twice and i'm okay with that i'm perfectly fine with admitting when i've made a mistake if this really does work that well we will start using yeast tolls much more often because this is insane i've never seen anything like it but to be honest we did a lot of different things with this particular brew so i think before we have a definitive yes this is the thing we'll have to do some experimentation and tests yeah exactly this is not definitive this is just uh oh maybe it's helping but anyway this is gonna go sit for like two weeks like we said thanks for liking and subscribing and as always thanks for watching have a great day [Music] bye [Music] you

Channel: City Steading Brews

Views: 94,671

Keywords: how to make metheglin mead, spiced metheglin mead, how to make metheglin, spiced mead, how to make mead, honey wine, metheglin, metheglin mead, metheglin recipe, metheglin mead recipe, easy mead recipe, mead recipe, mead making, How to amke metheglin mead

Id: oYUzoFc5Pck

Length: 18min 37sec (1117 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 16 2020