Mead

So me and my good lady were walking through a local town (Eastwood) and found a great health shop that sold Orange Blossom Honey for cheap.

Got 4 jars and made some mead up. I'll post some pics up.

Basically mead is probably the oldest alchoholic drink in the word and if anyone is nerd enough to play RPG/MMPORG games you will have likely have seen it sold in an Inn ;)

I boiled up the 4 jars in a pan of water and got a gravity of 1.080. If this were fermented down to 1.000 (Which is basically on the fence between sweet/dry tasting) it would be 10% alchohol.

Mead boiling away (This helps to kill off any germs which may be present)

Cooling the "must" (Fancy word for unfermented mead) in a sink of cold water. You cannot pitch yeast into hot must/wort or it will die almost immediately. So by cooling it you can pour it into a demijohn without shattering it and also pitch the yeast directly. A warm tempreture is ideal to facilitate yeast growth.

Wanting a change from my last mead experiment I doubled the amount of water and ended up with ~12 litres of 5% potential alchohol.

It's bubbling away (and i quite stupidly put it in my best fermenter) and will likely do so for a month or so. Soon as its down to 1.000 approx i might keg it and pressurise it and leave for a few months.

Watch this space for heart stopping mead updates. For now you will just have to do with this wiki link:

WTF is mead?