Mead Making with the Mermaid's Spirit

Today was our second annual mead making party. Last year we started The Mermaid's Spirit, which is a group of people within the SLO and Northern Santa Barbara County who enjoy brewing or learning about brewing. Jed and I still put ourselves in the second category. In the last year we've had epic failure with some of our flavored mead, a slight success/failure with the plain mead, and a really good review of our hard apple cider.

Today a few of us met up at our house in Paso and brewed 10 gallons of mead and 3 gallons of hard apple cider.

What we decided to do was to use the yeast from some of our 4-5 generation apple cider to use for the mead. With any luck it will be like our cider and will be sparkly. This year, we changed that aspect of the yeast, but we also added more honey to the mixture. Last year we used 20 lbs of honey for 20 gallons, equaling 1 lb of honey per gallon of mead. It turned out a bit weak and tasted very alcoholic. Of course there were also other elements at play with last year's mead as we moved around and probably didn't take care of the bottles in the best possible way. This year we used 35 lbs of honey in 10 gallons of mead making it 3.5 lbs of honey per gallon. We hope this helps the taste out and we look forward to bottling this batch.

Hard Cider Recipe:

(1) .75 gallon container of Martinelli's pure 100% apple juice in glass bottle (you can use whatever type of apple juice)
1/8th tsp of brewers yeast

Directions:
Pour yeast into apple juice. Shake and place airlock on top. Wait two weeks (first batch) and bottle. (This all depends on if your cider has finished fermenting or if you wish to stop it by this time. It also depends on the temperature of the cider that determines how fast it will ferment.)

NOTE: It needs to be 100% apple juice, not from concentrate.

Mead Recipe:

35 lbs of honey
8 gallons of water
(2) .75 containers of our hard apple cider

Directions for each of the 5 gallon carboys:
Placed cold water into two pots. Heated the water to 120 degrees and added honey. Once the honey and the water were well mixed we took it to the prepared warm carboys. (Think of glass carboys as jars when canning. If you're going to place hot liquid in them, you'll need to warm up the glass so that it won't shatter. ) We added one pot of honey water to the carboy and then added one of the .75 gallon of already made hard apple cider. Swill the hard apple cider so that all the yeast can go into the honey water. Then add the remainder of the honey water. Top with airlock and you're ready to go. We'll see how long this takes but it should be around 2 months.

Both drinks should be at about 15% alcohol or 30 proof when they are done.