Ingredients for a One Gallon Batch
-3 pounds of Clover Honey
-Lalvin 71B (Lalvin D47 preferred)
-1 TBS Yeast Nutrient (I used bread yeast for this)
Fermentation
Primary: 40 Days
Secondary: 3 Days (Should be more like 3 weeks)
Aged: 6 months
how to Make a Cheap One Gallon Mead
Hey everybody welcome to cheap brew, I am Anthony and what you are about to read is one way (not necessarily a good way) to make a traditional mead. Above you can see the ingredients I used for this project as well as my fermentation timeline. The only thing left is to talk about the equipment you’ll need, so lets get into that. In homebrewing there are a few tools that I have come to find essential based solely on this project. Those things are a fermentation vessel, some sanitizer, a pot, and an auto siphon. You can go without an auto siphon (as you can see in my video), but it’s not going to give you the best result unless you like drinking yeast.
The first thing I did with this mead was to mix the honey and water together in a pot. I used roughly half a gallon of water which I then brought up to a boil. Not for the honey though. Please don’t boil that. The reason I boiled the water was so that I could add some bread yeast and boil them to death. That sounds harsh but yeast are cannibals and the internet said they make a good yeast nutrient. Whereas I didn’t have any yeast nutrient available this seemed like a reasonable thing to do. I can neither confirm nor deny that it made any difference whatsoever aside from adding the slight flavor of bread yeast. You can do what I did, but you might be better off to use raisins or actual yeast nutrient.
After murdering some bread yeast I lowered the heat and let the water stop boiling. After a couple minutes I then added three pounds of clover honey that I bought from Wal Mart. Stir this until the honey is dissolved. You will probably fall in love with the smell as you are doing this step, that is unless you are using bread yeast as a yeast nutrient. It should smell really sweet, like an herbal tea. It’s quite comforting. Once you’re done mixing pour the must into your fermenter. It would be a good idea to use a big funnel if you don’t have a wide mouth fermenter (or you can use an auto siphon). What you should not do, which I did, is add the honey must to the fermenter with water already inside it to attempt to get a 100 degree temperature to pitch your yeast sooner. It might overfill, so it’s better to add what is in your pot and then backfill with cold water until the fermenter is about 80 or 85% full.
Next, its time to activate your yeast! I have taken a liking to Lalvin D47 for meads, but for this one I was inexperienced, and I used the wine yeast I got from the home brew store that I intended to use on a different project. This wasn’t necessarily a bad choice, but if you do it you should try some Lalvin D47. There are usually instructions on the back side of the Yeast packet but if all else fails just take some of your honey water and put it in a small bowl then dump the yeast on it so they can rehydrate. You can also do what I did for this project and just use a small bowl and some warm water. Either way will work, it’s not rocket science.
After about 20 minutes passed for yeast hydration I decided it was time to add the yeast to the honey must. The temperature of the must was around 100 degrees when I did this. I wanted to make sure the yeast had some oxygen to use during fermentation (the yeast use it during fermentation) so I shook the jar around for about a minute and then added the air lock. That’s about all there is to making mead, at least to get it started. It can require a bit more finesse later on in the project than what I was able to give this poor mead.
After about 6 weeks of fermentation and a 25 mile car ride to my new apartment, it was time to rack the mead so it could clear for a little while. This was the step that caused me the most grief in the long run. In any brew you should try to keep things as sanitary as possible, which means you should not rack a brew using the old fashion gas siphoning technique. That’s right, I used my mouth and applied suction to one end of some pvc tubing. I sanitized mu mouth with a shot of straight Tequila first, but it was not enough. There was either bacteria on the tubing or the two bowls I used to hold the mead while I was rinsing the fermenter. Somewhere along the line I helped a little bacteria family start a colony. I just didn’t know it at the time. I used a funnel to help me get all the mead back into the fermenter and let it sit for a total of three more days to clear, which was also a mistake. It would have been better to leave it for more like three weeks, but this is how we learn.
“It looks really clear,” is what I recall myself saying, but as a more seasoned home brewer looking back on his first real project I know now that it looked kind of hazy still. However, in my mind, three days had passed and it was time to put the mead into bottles. How did I bottle without an auto siphon and bottle filler, you might ask. I used a my trusty funnel and poured the mead into the bottles. The first two bottles were “really clear.” For the second two the motion of my repeated pouring had mixed the yeast back into the mead. I now had two bottles that were very hazy and two that were clear to what was then my standards.
I was so pleased with myself. I put the bottles on display, leaving them out on the counter with their cool little labels so I could look at them while I was grabbing my evening whiskey. But one night I noticed a small layer of scum forming at the top of the bottle. On the inside. I didn’t mention it in the video but I had noticed the same substance during the fermentation as well. I did what any good home brew novice would do and I googled bacteria infections in mead and found some strikingly similar results. I looked for ways to fix it for a long time and finally settled on one irritating option. Pasteurization.
There were a few things that worried me about pasteurization, first and foremost was the possibility of having less wine than I started with. The second was losing alcohol content. Alcohol boils at 173 degrees and to kill bacteria you need to hit 140-160 for at least a minute. I thought that was pretty close but it was a risk that I took anyways, and it was a success. There was no need for me to go through that if I had just had an auto siphon but after I put the wine back into the bottle there was no more growth. And any yeast that was alive during the boil died with the bacteria. After that, clearing was rather expeditious. There was one problem though. Once everything was cleared there was a massive pile of loose debris at the bottom of the bottle. Oh if only I had just let it clear longer.
Six months went by before I was daring enough to open a bottle of my franken-mead. I will say I was pleasantly surprised by it, even if it was pretty obvious that I had used bread yeast as a nutrient and left a thick layer of dead yeast in the bottom of the bottle for six months. The taste of that was a little off putting, but I was able to eventually enjoy all four bottles with some careful pouring. The lesson to be learned for this project is that if you’re going to make a mead the cheapest way possible you will still need an auto siphon.
Cheap Brew 