Strawberry Mead 2.0 - From Start to Tasting!

hello everyone welcome to feywood Mead you can call me Mandy or Faye whichever it doesn't really matter to me strawberry Mead has uh been my most viewed mead as of today it has over over two and a half thousand views at least the first video does and I am like oh God I didn't add nutrients I didn't stabilize I didn't do a lot of things so here we are we are making strawberry 2.0 very much an updated recipe I should not be fermenting strawberries this time because that video has so many views I just feel like if the process sort of repeats itself with 2.0 over here I want to make sure that I'm I guess kind of thorough or more thorough than I normally am just for the sake of new Mead makers I want to try to explain a little bit more than I normally do so right now I do have a little bit of liquid a little bit of Honey liquid in here at the moment um just because I kind of overfilled my pot I tend to like to warm up my honey a little bit just to blend with water if you just pour honey straight in here you're gonna have a thick layer and then you just have to shake it and shake it and shake it and shake it and shake it until your arms are dead usually it says on the yeast packet how warm the water should be when you start waking those little babies up so usually your meat should be a little bit warmer too and of course the quality of water does affect the flavor of your meat that affects the growth of your yeast the health of your yeast these are all little things to just kind of think about so I used about two and a half pounds of Dutch gold clover honey I want to just like kind of like a neutral honey flavor so just real quick like here I am going to shake this for a little bit just really want to make sure that honey is getting blended while you're essentially making a traditional mead your yeast it'll tell you what to do on the packet now today I'm using Mangrove Jacks Mead yeast it's a high extra producing strain gives fresh floral Esters especially when fermented cool this can also get up to 18 percent so if you just want to push your yeast to their limit you would probably end up with like a super super strong Mead which I would really recommend with something as delicate as strawberry you know oh okay sprinkle context contents directly onto a maximum of six gallons usually your yeast want to like wake up first but I will follow the directions Mangrove Jack now another reason we want to shake is to add oxygen into the meat because yeast do need oxygen to to create energy and to grow and multiply basically something you do want to be careful of is you don't want your must to be too hot because you could kill your yeast my little temperature thingy says it is about 86 degrees in here it's right around at a gallon which is what we want we don't want to close this head space too much because heaven forbid it bubbles over because that sucks we don't want that to happen I am going to take a gravity reading for the point of a hydrometer is to measure the sugar content and that is how we end up reading how much alcohol will be present in your meat so it bounces around and floats like that there are several numbers on these things there's one in particular that we look at I need to put this down to read it correctly so this is at about 1.086 and because this was fully sanitized with star sand let's just make sure there aren't any bacterias and you know unwanted things present that could potentially spoil your Mead okay I'm just gonna pour this in we've got about a half a packet here I've been sitting in my fridge for a little while so I hope it's still alive usually when you want to use a packet I think within a month so I hope it's okay I guess we will find out I'm just gonna mix this in in my airlock I have sanitized water you don't want to just put regular water in there because it can get moldy that's the whole thing with sanitizer is it gets rid of bacterias and things plus if little bugs find their way in here which they will little fruit flies especially they'll get stuck and they can't make their way into your Mead you need nutrients if you do not have nutrients added into your Mead the yeast will become very very stressed and angry they will add some not so great taste to your Mead and it could come out tasting like Rocket Fuel now you can use I've never done it there's something called the tosna method t-o-s-n-a I think you just look it up on the internet I always just follow the instructions on my fermaid K container this says to add one and a half teaspoons per five gallons a ferment Care at the end of the lag phase and that's usually between 12 and 24 hours and then the same amount around one-third sugar depletion which I think is like five-ish days or so I mean if you really want to do it right then you have to like measure it along the way and I never do that now especially when there's nothing else in here I think usually it's recommended that you do another feeding you kind of like sort of Step feed in a way because you want to make sure they don't get mad there's just honey it's only thing they have to go on and honey is very complex it can be difficult to break down and consume I'm just going to add an eighth I guess an eighth of a teaspoon right now I'm gonna put some in here so the yeast have something else to eat besides honey all right well that is it this is step one I hope I explained things okay again I don't really go into a lot of detail because I think a lot of the people who watch my channel are more on the experience side you know it's like once you get once you get over the beginner hump and you start to understand things a lot of the the repetition can become wears some wears them wears them sometimes it can take a week sometimes it can take two weeks three weeks up to a month for your yeast to finish doing what they need to do alrighty we'll see you in a few seconds just continuing on with this video so what I did because I'm notorious for forgetting to put things in bags thus creating a larger mess for myself to Rack through so I bought some strawberries they are on sale right now amazing I love late spring any kind of like Outlet grocery you're gonna be able to find berries for like really cheap so last night I sanitized them I sliced them into small slices because I want as much surface area as possible especially putting them in these bags now I am using nut milk bags wait did I stabilize this let's see where it's at man this should be fully fermented out I started this on the 22nd of May it is now June 8th it's not done yet all right well I just gave like a little smidgen of food I guess the strawberries are going back in the freezer April Fools see in a minute welcome back here we are I have four pounds they're still like pretty much mostly Frozen not gonna lie uh strawberries uh and I'm just gonna rock on top of this I forget that I'm like doing a full breakdown for everyone just in case you're new so this is a racking cane and tubing you do have to buy tubing separately from the actual cane portion it's really cheap though like this is a super affordable Tool It's very effective so when you're racking this is the safest way to transfer Mead from one bustle to the other that's what racking means the one that you're racking from needs to be higher from the one that you're racking to the larger the space difference the faster it'll go just an FYI and I did it stabilize this Mead that is the other important thing I did not show that on camera because it is super super simple um so when you stabilize is potassium metabisulfite a half a teaspoon per gallon to prevent fermentation from restarting so it doesn't like kill your yeast it just puts them to sleep like it stops them from being able to come back to life basically to like wake up the other one is like a sterolent preservative this on because I do have some little fruit flies hanging about I love these things a subscriber sent them to me I'm probably gonna let this sit for about two weeks or so so I will see here in a second all right oh yeah this didn't go dry I think I might have forgotten about this made and I didn't add nutrients correctly so I hope that I don't have any like off flavors from Angry yeast this is only 9.7 percent which is not very high but that's okay maybe it'll make for easier drinking this looks beautiful so I I left the strawberries in just barely over two weeks so something that I learned very recently is that strawberries if they are left to sit in your Mead for too long can impart a plastic like flavor and that's from the seeds either you like skin the seeds off your strawberries or you just don't leave them in for very long I guess I hadn't noticed it before in any of my strawberry Meads but then again I also like typically remove strawberries at about two weeks most fruit actually I remove around two weeks but it's going to need some balancing because I haven't done barely anything to it as We Know to be very careful right now to make sure you're not pulling like a bunch of sediment into your fresh made because we want to get rid of that we like clear product really it's more for visuals than anything but just nice to have a clear maid you know what I'm saying oh boy this is full good so far it's better than my first Mead because I had like a gallon and a half because I did not measure correctly at all this is gorgeous okay let me just say oh my friends look at this Wow Wow Wee wow so it ended at 1.012 usually we want that down to a nice one because that means the yeast were healthy they did their job well now I always always always sanitize everything you want to keep things cleaned and sanitized because bacteria man it can infiltrate and absolutely destroy everything I have tasted a bacterial infection before and it is not pleasant to say the least it is pretty awful I think it's around 1.016 only like what four points of a gravity was added here I'm just gonna close that up for now let's taste test this and see what needs to be done oh wow this smells so good quite tart for a strawberry of course very happy so there's basically no mouth feel here it hits you tart strawberry and there's a little bit of like a lingering aftertaste but it's pretty much gone what we want to add is some tannin I might look at another acid just to try to build some more body those are basically the two major things that you want to use to balance your Mead and make it just a complete experience as this is right now like for you know if you're brand new and you're like whoa tannin's acids all that it's too much for me to think about this is still actually very nice where it is it's just a it's like a very clean quick drink it's very light um as it is maybe a little bit chilled would be would be nice uh as as like a first very simple Mead this is pretty chill as it is but I want to add those extra layers to make it go from good to great just kind of taking a look at what acids are present in strawberries what we've already pulled from them is going to be citric acid by far is the highest but it does also have malic acid and something else called elegic we might not need any however I will add tannin so this says for like a white or rose wine use a quarter teaspoon per gallon there's a roundabouts quarter tisp I want to do like a little before and after taste you know because I am pretty new at um acid tannin balance myself a tannin you do need to like Let It chill out for for like a couple of weeks I think it's like three to six weeks if you don't add it during fermentation you add it after then you need to like Let It settle before you bottle but I'm gonna see if there's like a flavor difference right now that I can taste or not flavor but mouth feel difference that's a difference now this does need some sweetening uh I think where it is you know obviously there's sugar present but just a little bit more would be nice and would also help bring down that um that high acid Point um but I think I'm also going to add a little bit of lactose because I'm digging the creamy vibe to my Meads and you know a little bit of like strawberries and cream right it works very well together I'm gonna add a teaspoon for now and then since Christina is here maybe I will have her taste this and see how she feels about it too Miss Christina just popped on in so this is like a teaspoon of lactose what honey do I want to use to back sweeten I'm gonna use Tupelo because I have it it's fancy so I have the strawberry before I added anything to it if you want to try this or not um just to get like a Vibe for the original quite happy to try it okay compared to the end result smells like strawberry jam it tastes like honey and strawberries there's like no space I'm gonna do a quarter cup we're gonna do that two pillow I think I'm saying that right not quite a full quarter cup is what I'm adding you want the spoon it's a good spoon [Laughter] just eating that honey straight is like um it's good we try it with all of those things together and see how we're vibing all right four um we already talked about that after so much more mouth feel oh my God cheers okay it's so much more complex it's different I wouldn't say it's that different the more interesting thing is it's much more balanced yeah because this is like getting smacked in the face with a strawberry yes and it's good it's really good as it is and it would be nice you know if you like decided to carbonate it for like one goes for different reasons like this is more wine like the mouth feel on this it is did not last at all right it's like you get hit by strawberries and then it's clean it's gone whereas this is like it hangs out and lingers definitely agree with that absolutely agree with that assessment love it though we're just gonna let this sit and hang out for a few weeks and then um let it clear because I don't think I'm gonna need to do anything else to this it's really nice this is like what I've been wanting to do with strawberries and then I always just had the awful luck of them re-fermenting on me just every time yeah this is a very nice clean strawberry Vibe so I'm hyped to see how it is in a few weeks so it's been about a month and as you can see this Mead has cleared out beautifully it is like crystal clear and everything has settled out really nicely on the bottom we love to see that makes racking so much easier so the one piece of equipment that that I haven't talked about yet that you will need for bottling this is something that you definitely want they're very affordable so there's really not much of an excuse and trust me it will make your life so much easier so this is a bottling wand and this end just connects to the tubing of your auto siphon and this is a valve release right here so when you're bottling you just push down and it will release liquid you know hypothetically right as long as this is working correctly when you lift up no Mead or liquid of any kind will will come out it does drip a little bit which I think is normal so you do want to like jump to your next bottle as quickly as possible so we're going to be using that today but first I need to rack and take all of this liquid off of the Schmutz at the bottom so I'm going to do that oh look at how pretty oh it's so beautiful yeah it's very clear so I've got a bunch of different types and sizes of bottles here as you can see I like to use these itty bitty ones for potential competitions uh so I've got four of those and then I have several 420 milliliter bottles as well as some 375s you want to make sure that you sanitize everyone very well so because we already racked off of all the gross stuff at the bottom you can take the the little cap of your bottling wand off because that's really just there to protect your auto siphon from picking up a lot of stuff so you're going to want to push down on that wand and get your auto siphon going at the same time can be tricky the first time you try to do that it took me a minute to figure it out so you just push down and it fills it's great you want to bring the liquid as high up as you can like basically stop right before right before it starts to overflow essentially there we go get a lot of meat out of this nice okay so I got four full 420 milliliter bottles and I got two uh almost three hundred seventy five milliliter bottles and then four of these little 187 milliliter bottles which is pretty awesome this is a lot of meat I'm very happy with this that's it look at how I know I've already been talking about this but this Mead is seriously so pretty I'm very very happy with the clarity of this stay tuned in the next section of this video is the tasting the official tasting oh my God so I've been recording this wasn't this wasn't on I turned it on but I didn't turn it to record like a dunderhead I've already had this I drank it but I'll drink it more for you trust me it is a delight strawberry here we go round two this has been bottled for almost two months almost not quite as a little reminder it's sweet and it's only 9.7 percent super drinkable super good let me tell you so good I mean on the nose it is like a strawberry dessert it reminds me of like when you cook down strawberries and you make sort of like a strawberry chunky syrupy thing for angel food cake to like pour over it so you just take strawberries and sugar and you boil them down a little bit you know and some water and then you pour them on cake and this is what that smells like it smells like heaven basically so good a just sweet strawberry and of course honey you know I mean it has that like sugary vibe to it but the amount of honey that's in here isn't overpowering uh it's perfect it's not too syrupy it has just this nice smoothness to it and because the strawberries were not fermented that is the key here do not ferment your strawberries that turns them into we would have a completely different drink here if you watch any of my past videos involving strawberries you will see that because I didn't stabilize or I didn't stabilize correctly and the strawberries ended up fermenting completely changes the flavor I mean 100 it's it's so vastly different that you would have to just ex like experiment yourself I mean it's just pure strawberry it's like biting into a strawberry I don't know how much more I can describe that but it's one of those fruits where like the the flavor of the fruit doesn't really change some fruits do kind of shift a little bit it's very good and it's so easy it's a very simple Mead to make I'm I'm very proud of this Mead it's a great like beginner's recipe because really you just have to make sure your yeast are happy you're focusing on your base Mead making and then make sure it's stabilized one way or another if the version of stabilizing that you're going for is just fermenting and pushing the yeast out to their tolerance as far as they can go be careful with that give your meat a lot of time when I first started my channel that's what I was doing I wasn't using metabisulfite or potassium sorbate a I ended up with super high high abvs I would use my hydrometer and I would test it see where it was a couple of weeks later I'd test it again and it would seem to be fine but your Meads can slow in their ferment significantly and depending on when you're Brewing as well because if you're making meat in the colder months you know it can like stop and then start re-fermenting once it gets warmer out anyway that's my two cents there's not a whole lot to say about this because it's just delicious sweet strawberry I'm very proud of this and I definitely encourage anyone out there to try it thank you thank you thank you so much for watching follow me on all the things I'll have all the links below I'll have the recipe below I appreciate you all see you next time bye

Channel: Faewood Mead

Views: 73,764

Keywords: mead making, traditional mead, mead channel, home brew channel, home brewing, how to make wine, how to make mead, 1 gallon of mead, 1 gallon mead recipe, mead recipes, mead recipe, faewood mead, natural brewing, wine making channel, how to brew, racking mead, brewing, honey, homebrewing, mead, making, gallon, fermentation, fermenting, making mead, strawberry mead, strawberry wine, how to make strawberry mead, strawberry mead recipe, tasting strawberry mead, strawberry mead review

Id: Jy8fgd2y9JE

Length: 24min 28sec (1468 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 17 2022