A Little Hiatus and a Mead Update

I think I got overwhelmed by my mead making activities last year. The once-a-week mead, while not particularly difficult to achieve, taxed me a bit on storage and keeping track of what was what. And then when my cyzer got an apparent bacterial infection, I got disappointed. While I made a few more batches after that, the ardor that had been fueling my mead-making dissipated.

In the months since, I understand a lot more of what I was originally reading. It wasn't so much an infection, but rather the presence of wild yeast -- most likely Brettanomyces -- and I'd imagine it was because I didn't wash my apples nearly good enough while making the cyber. It's definitely not a killer for the mead, but it's something I'll need to control for and prevent in the future.

After some 9 months though, I accidentally stumbled across Michael Jordan's YouTube channel (no, not that Michael Jordan!). He had posted a link to one of his videos on the Got Mead? Facebook group page and I immediately liked his simple style of mead making. No fancy equipment, no complex formulas for nutrient additions. Heck, it seems he's drinking many of his meads after just a couple of months. In one video in particular, he says he basically just cold-crashes his meads and drinks them.

While I imagine some of those meads likely taste a little "hot" because they're still so young, and I'd probably age mine much longer to mellow the alcohol, there was a lot to learn from him. He's producing a series called "52 Meads in a Year" -- hmmm, where have I heard that before? -- and his videos provide step-by-step instructions on how he's making them. At the end, he plans on producing a book with all the recipes and more information. It's really an entertaining effort and I'm hooked.

Between him and making a dandelion wine, I got back into mead making. I was looking at my yard of dandelion flowers and wonder what, if anything could be done with them, and found you could make wine with them. So I whipped up a batch, and after the primary fermentation was finished I racked it to a secondary and took a sample and -- oh my gosh! -- it was good! Still young of course, after only 5 weeks, but surprisingly tasty. Now I'm going to let it age in the secondary till around Christmas, which is seemingly the traditional time to crack open the wine.

To be honest, though, I all but abandoned my meads. Other than drinking a few of my very first meads -- one in particular earned rave reviews from my friends who were not quite sure what to expect, and if you knew these guys you'd realize any praise is a superlative -- I basically ignored my meads. While it's probably not a terrible thing that I just let them sit there undisturbed, a few should have been racked off their lees a long time ago, and I'm finally getting around to doing that.

I've also bought the ingredients necessary to make more mead again. One I'm going to try is a simple hard cider recipe that I got from Michael Jordan. It's essentially just apple juice and yeast. Other recipes I've seen on YouTube call for adding sugar, but Michael, as I said, takes a more simple approach to many things. Another video I saw on hard cider also use used juice and yeast (well, and a bunch of different additives like wine tannin and the like), but then he back sweetened it afterwards with brown sugar and cinnamon. I may do something like that.

But in the main I think I'm going to follow Michael Jordan's 52 meads in a year recipes, following his video progression one by one, and see how they turn out. If nothing else, it gets me back into making mead.

With that, though, let's update on how my meads are progressing. "Mead," actually. I've only just begun racking the ones I have standing around, so I did just one. In the days ahead I'll be doing all the others.

Mead No. 4

This was an experimental mead that I used dehydrated orange slices in. I'll admit this had a very tiny amount of a film on top, and while I initially thought it may have been "contaminated" in some way by my cyzer, I think in reality it probably was from the oranges I used. The film's limited presence suggests the dehydration process may have killed most, but not all of the wild yeast. So once again, I'll only be using extremely well-washed fruit in the future.

I tasted it, and as before there's still a somewhat hard alcohol taste to it, much as there was when I initially racked it, and this one may require a lot of time. What I'm thinking of doing is adding potassium metabisulphite to it to kill any yeasts that may still be present, and then back sweetening it. It wasn't horrible, more like a very dry wine, and it's lost all the orange-y taste it had, so perhaps I can salve it by sweetening it.