What Went Wrong With This Mead?

Meads can be an incredibly delicious drink to brew at home but it does require a lot more time and patience compared to beers and ciders for hundreds of years Mead has been associated with weddings in fact back in the day it was expected of the Father of the Bride to provide the couple with enough meat to get them through their first month together it actually is the origins of the word honeymoon inspired by this history not long after proposing to Charlotte I thought it'd be a really nice idea to brew my first and so far only Mead my thinking here was that I thought it'd be a really nice wedding gift for all of our friends and family as little favors but it didn't quite work out that way I thought it was a really simple recipe and added no additional flavorings the only ingredients was honey water yeast nutrient and yeast I did also use Captain tablets to sterilize the honey before I ended the yeast So to avoid any nasties developing in the fermentation I messed up royally when it came to adding the honey I definitely added probably half as much as I should have I think I added about two kilograms possibly even just a kilogram I ended up with a very low ABV Mead in fact it's 5.5 which isn't terrible but most of the time you'll see professional Meads be around 10 so anyway a year into making this Mead me and Charlotte were very excited and gave our first ever try of it and it was horrible so um we left it for another year and we tried it not long before our wedding and it was still horrible the second tasting really showed that this Mead was no good and so we decided not to give it away as wedding gifts as I didn't want to poison my grandmother for actually even though no one was drinking Mead on the wedding day we still had an absolutely brilliant time one of the best days of my life probably the best day of my life and we had a really nice honeymoon afterwards even though we didn't actually end up drinking any of this meat I made we still had a really good time and I got to ride on a steam train so I thought before I pour all this meat down the drain that I would give it one final taste to see if it's any good and see if it's actually worth you trying to make mead for your own wedding day or just for fun so here's the bottle you'll see that this has got the date of when I bottled it which is August 2020 so this has been in the bottle for over two years now so let's open it and see if it's matured into a really lovely Mead foreign ly clear it looks like wine really [Music] um but yeah since drinking other Meads I think that it's clear that this hasn't had enough honey in it which is why it's so clear I think if it had more honey it would have ended up being a little bit more dark um smell wise smells like wine along with just a tiny hint of honey it smells quite Pleasant actually quite Floral the honey that I used for this was Wildflower honey so it's quite a mixed type of Honey which could have been part of the problem as to why it didn't taste very good but maybe it does taste good now I'll give it a sip oh oh God oh that's got awful oh tastes like flowers but not in a nice way it says so alcoholic I can't believe it's only 5.5 I've had Meads that are like 11 that go down so smooth but this does not moth oh no no [Music] that's the last drop of that that I can drink oh so as well as getting on a steam train during our honeymoon we also went on lots of nice walks visited lots of lovely towns and villages in Devon and we ended up visiting the biggest Meadery in the UK lime Bay Winery make absolutely incredible Meads I'm such a big fan of theirs we really struggled to choose which two bottles to buy but we went for with ginger and lightly spiced which we're going to be enjoying this Christmas so I was chatting to one of the Brewers there when we visited and I was really surprised when they gave me this top tip for making meat and I'm gonna use it the next time that I try making Mead which is to add sugar when you're fermenting your honey there should actually be a load of added table sugar because the yeast ends up first fermenting that table sugar and it results in the fermentation of the honey not being as aggressively done and that means that you get more of a honey taste in the final product I don't think I can make worse Mead than what I've done so far so any Improvement will be massive for me I think I'm also going to use a much higher quality of Honey next time around to watch me successfully Brew something check out this video where I brewed a bitter using carrots

Channel: Kveiksmith Daryl

Views: 1,762

Keywords: brewing, homebrew, home, brew, beer, kveik, kviek, kivek, kievk

Id: z6VmNXAagic

Length: 5min 54sec (354 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 03 2022