The whole purpose of getting into home-brewing was to make a Mead for our Handfasting, and after three brews I figured I was ready to give it a shot. Unfortunately, this wasn’t ready by the end of June, but I figure it will be great for our anniversary!

Ingredients

• 5kg Bees Own Honey
• 5gm Lalvin EC-1118 yeast
• 5gm Yeast Nutrient (diammonium phosphate)
• Filtered water
• 4 small cinnamon sticks
• 12-20 cloves
• 3 small, whole nutmegs

• OG: 1.085
• FG: 0.998

ALC/VOL 12.3%

Brewed April, bottled May 2007

Rehydrated yeast in 50ml water, ~40°C. Left sit for 15 minutes.

Heated 2lt water in a pot, but did not bring to boil. When it was warm, added honey and stirred.

After 15 mins, stirred liquid yeast, and poured into the fermenter that already had some cold water in it. Immediately added the heated honey. Splashed and stirred lots. Added yeast nutrient. Then added water to 20lt.

This bubbled away happily for almost a month. When it was ready for racking, I brought cinnamon, cloves, and nutmegs to a slow boil. I ground nutmegs halfway, and then put the rest in whole. Once boiled, turned off heat and let sit for a while. Then added 2 Tablespoons organic honey, topping up water to fill pot again and brought to boil again (worked out to ~3/4 Litre of liquid). Strained liquid into a jar, and poured into 2ndary Fermenter. Then racked Mead into 2ndary.

When it was ready for bottling, I stirred in 300gm of Lactose to help with sweetening.

Note also, it helped to give the barrel a shake every now and then throughout the process, as the shaking puts oxygen into the mix which helps with fermentation, especially when brewing without malts.

Won’t have any tasting notes until we give it a try…

This labelled was designed to work alongside the design for our Handfasting invitations. Deb still has reservations about the name, but I think you couldn’t name a mead anything else….