Wild Mountain Honey Strawberry Mead

They just had a sale on Strawberries at the Local Grocery store. Although I typically prefer local BC Grown Strawberries over the California counterparts, I did manage to find some very sweet smelling large deep red berries in the pile. I immediately grabbed 8 Pounds of them.

Awhile back, I also stumbled across a booth selling organic Honey and picked up a couple of pails of Unpastuerized mountain wild flower Honey. It is a beautifully thick and deep yellow honey with a sweeter and richer taste than the Clover Honey I usually use.

So now that I have given you the history of the ingredients in this batch of Strawberry Mead, let's move onto making Mead.



I cleaned and weighed out the strawberries and put them in a large stainless steel pot with 1.5 Litres of Spring water and the Citric Acid & Honey. while heating up the mixture, I crushed the strawberries with a hand crusher thingy (Sort of like a pastry cutter.) All the recipe's I found said to hand crush, I am assuming this is to keep the must chunky. Heating the mixture up, just to disolve the honey I then transfered the must to my 2 Gallon primary fermenter and added water to bring the level up.
I then checked the Specific Gravity and found it to be right around 1.091 which would bring the Mead to a 12% Alc level if left to ferment to dry.

I prepared and dumped in 2 packages of Lalvin K1-V116 Yeast, which I'm told is a Mead Yeast and let it sit on my fridge (Nice and warm.)

I did not have any yeast nutrient left, so I figured I would try it au-natural...well sort of.

Ingredients:

6 lbs strawberries
4 Tsp Citric Acid
4.5 litres water
7 cups unpasteurized wild mountain honey

spec gravity
1.091

1 Package of Lalvin K1-V1116

The Must was innoculated at 5PM PST on April 29th, 2008

See ya in a few days.

Basic Mead

Here is a Basic Mead recipe I found.

Mead, which is also known as honey wine, is produced from 51 per cent honey, water and yeast. As fruit, spices and herbs can be added to mead, the result is a wide range of varieties, much like grape wine.

Ingredients like yeast, tannin, acids and nutrients can be obtained from beer-or wine-making supply shops or can be ordered online.

Here is a recipe for sweet mead to try at home.

Sweet Mead

1.5 kg (3 1/4 lb) pure honey

3.5 l (14 cups) water (not distilled, no chlorine)

15 ml (3 tsp) malic acid

7 ml (1 1/2 tsp) tartaric acid

1 ml ( 1/4 tsp) tannin

5 ml (1 tsp) yeast nutrient

1 campden tablet

1 pkg wine or mead yeast

In a 4.5-l (1 gallon) plastic bucket, mix ingredients (except yeast). One day later, add yeast.

After 1 month, transfer mixture to a glass jug. Keep at a constant temperature of 21 to 24 C (70 to 75 F.) Transfer to a clean glass jug once a month for the first 3 months. After that, transfer when the mead is clear of any layer of yeast or sediment buildup.

When the fermentation has completed, mead has cleared and no bubbles are visible, it is time to bottle. You may have to wait a full year before bottling. If you bottle too soon, you might have a lot of sediment which will detract from the mead.

Makes 4.5 l (1 gallon).

Cranberry Mead... well sort of

OK, so I picked up just over 11 pounds of fresh "organic" cranberries. According to the Polish farm guy some old guy in the area "with nothing better to do" grows a small crop of them organically.... Personally I think it was just a sales pitch but who am I to argue.

So I got home and dumped them into my handy steam juice extractor and began the process of pulling out the juice. I guess it shouldn't really be that much of a surprise, but that 11 some odd pounds of Cranberries resulted in only about 2 litres of juice (Including pulp). Typically the steam juicer is great at leaving the pulp behind, but after about 2 hours of waiting for only a small amount of juice I got impatient and started to crush the berries. Must be the results driven Kraut in me.

You might be wondering why the long background story, well that is to explain why this is sort of a cranberry Mead. You see, with only 2 litres of juice and 2 litres of honey already in the pot I needed to make up the space with something other than 4 litres of water.... Ah blackberry juice. So here is the recipe



2 Litres Honey
2 Litres Cranberry juice & pulp
1/2 Litre Apple Juice (Pure reconstituted no sugar added stuff)
1 Litre steam extracted Blackberry juice
2 1/4 Litres Spring Water
1 Cup Mushed up cranberries
2 Packs of 1118 Yeast
2 Teaspoons Nutrient

Measurements:
Specific Gravity: 1.112
Pot Alcohol : 15% Approx
Innoculated at 8PM on November 5th @ 80 F


This should be interesting as the juice is nice and sweet with a bit more tart than the Blackberry on its own.

As a side note, although the 11 lbs of Cranberries only yeilded about 2 litres of juice and pulp all was not a waste. I divided up the remaining pulp and berries and froze them for future cranberry chutney. At some point I need to get the recipe from my brother and post it on here.