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In the earlier post about fruit picking, the purpose of my picked fruits is the usual: homebrew. Blackberry are bloody expensive and farmed ones are not as delicious! Anyway, In a few months, I will have, hopefully, a very delicious drink!
I favour brewing mead over other drinks because, well, I prefer to other drinks and it’s the one that is most difficult to mess up. Why? Honey, that’s why!
Ingredients:
- 440g of blackberries for primary and another 440g for secondary (I picked 880g, the second half has been frozen);
- Zest and juice of one lemon;
- 1.5kg of honey;
- Enough water to complete 5L;
- D-47 yeast.
First, sterilize all the equipment. Leave the berries soaking in cold water and remove any creepy crawlers that float up (hey, it’s organic stuff!)
Place the berries in the demijohn (the glass fermenting thingy). There might still be some bacteria/wild yeast/general oganisms that need to be killed.
Want to sterilize fruit? Want to sterilize anything? Cover it in honey! Add half of the honey into the demijohn and leave the fruits soaking in it. Honey is anti-everything… it will kill wild yeast and other fungi, bacteria, any tiny organism in and around the berries + all the health benefits. If the amount of honey added is kept high, the likelihood of infections in your brew decrease quite a lot.
That’s why it’s hard to get mead wrong. Sanitation and infections are a big problem in wine and beer, but mead has the power of honey to back it up! Pretty cool, right?
After a good honey soaking for about 30 minutes, add 1.5L of boiling water to the demijohn and let it sit for another few minutes. Close it with the airlock/blow tube. Even though mead is harder to infect, don’t take chances! Further sterilization will occur, but this step is most important to dissolve the honey, mostly.
In a sauce pan, heat the water add the honey, lemon juice and zest. Mix until the honey has been dissolved. Add it to the demijohn and close it again. Only pitch the yeast when the most is below 25C.
Let it ferment for a minimum of 10 days (fermentation is about to stop usually when the airlock is producing only one bubble every 4 minutes). Move to secondary fermentation, add the other half of the berries still frozen and let it ferment for another 3 weeks. Then move to tertiary fermentation for another 3 weeks. The mead should be clear and ready for bottling at this stage.
It takes a long time to make it, but trust me, it’s worth it!
Reblogged this on BEER not WAR.
Good GRIEF ! – you’re the first person I’ve ever come across who makes mead !!! You are surely a most unusual person. 😀
I make a lot of mead! I have several recipes if you look up mead in my search engine! They are great!
It would make me put on weight just to look at it. Although I’ve never tasted mead, I adore honey; and I can’t believe I wouldn’t LOVE mead, regardless of whether or not it retains any honey flavour … Sighh … The world is an unfair place.
It’s so easy to make mead! I mean, REALLY easy. And you can have sweet mead, dry mead and everything in between. Sweet mead retains the sweetness of the honey. Dry mead, all the sugar in the honey is turned into alcohol, so not that much. My two favourite brews are beetroot mead and elderflower mead. (Trying to keep my brews seasonal and organic, so that I can use as much fresh products as possible.)
All it takes to make it is a water container and ingredients you can find at your local shop. Why not give it a go?
Please click my blog for more MEAD!
Already I know that mead is not something I’m going to be indulging in … I’m sure it’s wonderful, but not for an old fart who struggles to keep weight down (as much as possible, anyway) … 🙂
Thanks for the follow.
I like the way you make mead
Soaking it in honey would clear the berries of any bacteria is something new to me.
Thanks for that too.
All the best.
Check out the properties of honey! Its indeed a miraculous fluid!
Thank you for the comment!!
Nice one! Love a mead made with the best local ingredients!
I do that quite often! My last local ingredient mead was elderflower mead! It was reaaaally good!
Just made an elderflower mead.. Bit missed the flowers! Had to get dried.. But the elderberries I’ll be harvesting soon!
Ditto! Elderberry mead soon, plums in september and pear in october… the last two I grow in my backyard! Still finding out what to brew in november and december!
How do you maintain the temp for D-47?
I usually leave the fermenting bin in a room in the middle of the house that has no sunlight whatsoever and the temperature remains at constant 19C ± 0.5C. If the temperature starts varying too much, I place the demijohn in a 5 gallon bin full of water and keep topping up every other day. Larger brews are easier to control the temperature just because there is a lot more liquid.
That’s what you asked, isn’t it?
Indeed. I live in a very swampy, hot and humid place. So D47 is not an option for me unless I want a very large cooling bill!!!
Oh! hehehe! I have a spare room with no sunlight that became my brewery. The room is very thermally stable, but when it varies, even if by more than 2 degrees, that’s what I do.
Try out a simple 5L brew with the water technique. Add a few ice cubes to the water around the demijohn… that should do the trick
Thanks!
hi there! the elderberries ae looking good now.. yet no white powder on them .. so please remind me what i need to do to make elder BERRY champagne? Thanks!
Hey… well, elderflowers have natural yeast on the petals, elderberries do not. For elderberry champagne, its pretty much the same recipe, but use berries instead of flowers, of course, abd buy brewers yeast. D47 or ec1118 are good, but you will need some equipment. If you ferment it directly in the bottles, you WILL get very explosive bottle bombs, so I highly advise against using the same method. I made a post about a cheap way to make your homebrewing equipment. Its very easy and very safe
Can’t find your post? What’s the link please?
https://theworldisawindmill.com/2014/07/27/local-shops-homebrew-part-i-equipment/