A Story About Mead

One snowy January day (A.S. XXX), I took a gallon of sourwood honey that was purchased from a farmer's market so Lord Eadric Charbonnet and I could experiment with some techniques we had read about in Zymurgy magazine. On the way over, I stopped at the local grocer's and bought several lemons and oranges to flavor the brew. Now, if you have never driven in the snow in Falconcree, you will not be able to relate to how difficult it is to navigate over the ice-covered, hilly, twisty roads that look alike. Luckily, I used a 7000 lb. vehicle that crushed ice, left interesting zig-zag patterns and essentially cleared the way for the next set of winter travellers.

As for the recipe, we used the basic mead recipe you can find in the Complete Joy of Homebrewing with our own modifications for flavorings. As the honey dissolved, we cut the lemons and oranges and juiced them for all they were worth, including a portion of the peels which got pulped during the juicing process. 2 cups of lemon and orange juice were added to the mixture. Our "tea" of irish moss and other goodies was steeped in the wort and we skimmed the scum as we went along.

Now came the radical part. Eadric had formed a copper tube into a set of coils to make a heat exchanger. Using the heat exchanger, we decanted the wort in to a 5 gallon carboy allowing the wort to pass through an unbleached coffee filter we inserted into a funnel. Within three hours we had made our wort, chilled it, and decanted it into the carboy!

The next morning I added chamagne yeast the the wort, snapped in the airlock, and left it alone for a while. I would check on it once a month to see how it was progressing, and after three months, it had cleared up a bit. At six months, I could read the newspaper through it, and the yeastie beasties appeared to have gone dormant. I decanted my brew to another carboy, leaving about an inch of sludge. Almost all the sugar had been converted! I had about 13% alcohol content! It also tasted like Lemon Joy and could etch metal....

3 more months, and I was forced by circumstance to bottle it. I was not happy about it, but it had to be done. Two months later, I decided to attempt phase two of our experiment with mead. I took out four bottles of my Sahara-dry mead. Following the Complete Guide to Homebrewing's advice, I mixed up a batch of sugar water, and as my own special touch a cup of VERY strong strawberry herb tea. decanted 4 bottles of the Sahara-dry mead into this strawberry syrup, mixed (stirred, not shaken), redecanted back into 5 clean bottles and corked them up. One month later I had some of the best tasting mead I have ever experienced. Several people whose opinions I respect (and are fellow brewers) agreed that I had gotten it "right".

I entered a bottle of the unflavored mead that has not been touched in 6 years into a competition. It was still a little dry, but aged well! I still had several bottles of what I now referred to as the "Sahara Dry" to experiment with and I had a collection of herbal tea samples that seemed like candidates for flavoring my mead. Plum, spearmint, raspberry, and vanilla. Four bottles, one cup of strong tea of a different flavor per bottle plus a bit of sugar syrup yielded some nice tasting meads. The really interesting thing is that the spearmint tea infusion started working overtime and I got a bottle of sparkling mint mead.

There is still one unopened bottle of the unflavored mead in the pantry today (A.S. LX)