How to make your first mead: Viking Blod clone recipe with grocery ingredients | How to brew mead!

on this episode of doing the most we're gonna make a sort of clone recipe for Viking blood mead Viking blood is one of the introductory Meads that a lot of Noomi drinkers try another common brand people pick up is called Chaucer's it's very sweet almost clawing leaf so people seem to generally really like Viking blood and I've seen a lot of clone recipes of it online on home brewing forums and on reddit and I wanted to make my own variation made from stuff that you can just find at your local grocery store the idea being that this would be a great first Mead for very beginner masers to make so if this is your first time making Mead hopefully you can follow along with this recipe pick up the ingredients locally and get started in a five gallon batch my brew venture for this mead started out at Walmart I was hoping I could get everything there I picked up five gallons of spring water and 15 pounds of pure and simple honey which is just a plain grade-a honey we also got some cherry berry blend with tart cherries somehow I didn't capture footage of us grabbing this out of the freezer section but we got two three pound bags of that and then I had to jump over to another grocery store to get the hibiscus because they didn't have it in a Hispanic section at the Walmart I was at but they had plenty of it at this grocery store not really knowing how strong this hibiscus was I just opted to buy the whole store out so I picked up 20 ounces initially I'm only gonna use 12 so that's it it's pretty simple honey water yeast berries and hibiscus so instead of throwing the hibiscus directly into primary I decided to make a viscous tea instead so what I did was I put six ounces of hibiscus in each of these small containers and between the two I had about a gallon and a half of water that I added brought that up to a boil and then as soon as it hit boil cut the heat and let it steep for thirty minutes the hope here is that will extract plenty of that kind of tannic herbal quality of the hibiscus without pulling out so much of the bitter flavors since we're doing this over the stove instead of in primary it gives us a little bit more control then I've got those other eight ounces of hibiscus if needed we can add some back later [Music] while our tea was coming up to a boil and a steep I decided to go ahead and get the honey and some of the water into our fermenting bucket because we're using fruit I opted for a bucket over a carboy just for ease of access [Music] it's always wise to rinse out your honey containers and dump that honey water into your fermenter waste not want not [Music] and then we opened up our bags of frozen and thawed berries what's great about these is they're frozen at the peak of freshness and then all those cell walls are broken down by the ice crystals that form so your fruits nice and mushy for good extraction in your burrow [Music] [Music] make sure you get all the leftover juices out of there and then with your mash paddle stir like crazy this is so incredibly syrupy at this stage so it took many many minutes of stirring to really ensure that everything was made homogeneous in here [Music] now you could skip this step but I opted to add some pecked agains I'm to help further break down the fruit since we're gonna have about five gallons of liquid volume in here I went with a whole tablespoon of pectin enzyme that will help us get some better extraction out of that fruit [Music] after your 30 minutes steep of your hibiscus tea is done you're gonna bring it over and I use these pots because they have built-in steamer baskets which allows me to strain directly over the pot but alternatively you could just pour these through a colander the idea is to get all those solids out of there before you add your hibiscus tea into your must and you can see by the foam in the bucket that the pectin enzyme and the natural yeasts on the fruit are already starting to go to work but we're gonna pitch in some wine yeast and that will take over the fermentation [Music] now that the hibiscus tea is in we will top up with the rest of our water and continue stirring [Music] stir stir stir stir stir stir now I recommend typically for beginner Brewers to use ICI 1 1 1 8 you can check out my blog for more information I'm going to use D 47 which is also a pretty hardcore yeast D 47 we'll leave some fruitier flavors and esters in there won't have so much of that gassing off during fermentation and it will help accentuate the honey in the fruit a little bit better ec 1 1 1 8 would work just fine but it is pretty aggressive and tends to off-gas some of those more delicate flavors just using a sanitized chopstick to mix in my yeast [Music] and as usual I'm gonna ferment this semi-open by placing a sanitized paper towel over the bung and an upturned coffee mug on top of that as a sort of airlock and we're gonna allow this to Fuhrman out for the next two to three weeks and then it should be fermented dry here it is a few hours later after everything came to room temperature our gravity was just over 1.1 and every few days you're gonna need to punch that fruit cap down the fruit is really in here to contribute color more than it is flavour but it will also give some good acidity to the must what we're really going for is a nice bright poppy red color here it is a few days later you can see the fruit has really started to break down and the color on this is really starting to get beautiful so since I'm encouraging people to brew this along with me I am going to cut the video off here and I will do another update video when I get to the next phase of this fermentation which should be racking it off into secondary so I hope you'll go to the grocery store pick up some ingredients and get this brewing along with me and then we can just follow along together as we take this thing through to completion thanks for watching check out our blog and our Instagram and Pinterest for more from doing the most and thanks for stopping by

Channel: Doin the Most

Views: 23,099

Rating: 4.949791 out of 5

Keywords: viking blod, mead, dointhemost, homebrew, homebrewing, making cherry mead, cherry mead, vikings blood, viking blood cherry mead, viking's blood mead, cherry melomel, mead making, melomel, making mead, making your own mead, making viking blood, how to make cherry mead, easy cherry mead, cherry mead recipe, making vikings blood, making vikings blood mead, vikings blod, mead recipe, mead brewing, viking mead, make mead, how to make mead, make vikings blood, viking blod mead

Id: kolk_rkuIfg

Length: 8min 0sec (480 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 13 2019