A friend of mine makes one every year or so and usually gives me a bottle to try. They are often very similar to a white wine - still, with strong alcohol, and lightly sweet. They take a long time to mellow and seem to age very nicely.
I have chosen to make a 2 gal batch of Joe's Ancient Orange Mead found on Homebrewtalk.com. It is a flavored mead (duh) which, in addition to the oranges, contains cinnamon, cloves, and raisin. It is designed to finish sweet through the use of bread yeast which apparently doesn't have a very high alcohol tolerance. The recipe calls for 3.5 lbs of honey per gal. Since the clover honey I selected comes in 2.5 lb packages I decided to go with 7.5 lbs for my 2 gal batch. I considered trying out a more traditional plain batch first but this seemed like too much fun to resist.
The process is very simple. No boiling even. I'd expect that writing up this blog post will take just about as long as making this will (~30 min). I really love making things where there is a little up front investment in effort and then you set it and forget it until magic has happened, giving you something totally different as a result. Mead seems like it fits this description very well.
I plan to give this one a good 6 months to mature.
Recipe Details:
- 7.5 lbs of Clover honey
- 1.75 gal of tap water
- 2 Navel Oranges
- 1 handful of Raisins
- 2 Cinnamon Sticks
- 3 Cloves
- 1 tsp Bread Yeast
Results:
- OG:
- 1.120
- FG:
- 1.036
- Apparent Attenuation:
- 68%
- ABV:
- 11.03%
Process/Notes:
- 10/28/17:
- Poured containers of honey into 2 gal glass jar
- Added 1 gal of hot tap water. Poured a bit of this into the three containers of honey to rinse out the remainder
- Honey had sunk to the bottom and the water floated on top. Stirred until the honey was dissolved.
- Washed the oranges well and then sliced them into eighths. Added these to the mead.
- Added the raisins
- Added the Cinnamon Sticks and Cloves
- Added cold tap water to get close to full - ended up getting 3/4 of a gal in. Only left an inch and a half of head space (recipe recommended 3 in). Hopefully this wont be trouble.
- Gave it a final vigorous stir with a slotted spoon to aerate.
- Measured the temperature of the mix as 83 F. Decided to add the Bread yeast right away. Sprinkled on the surface, let it hydrate for a few min, then stirred in vigorously to aerate some more.
- Moved it to the basement utility sink to ferment (in case there is some overflow). The jar has a glass lid with no gasket - I'd expect the CO2 will be allowed to escape pretty well with it seated normally so I'll leave it as is.
- Measured the OG as 1.120 (wow!)
- 6/2/18 - It has been 7 months since making up this mead. It has been fermenting/aging undisturbed in a dark corner of my basement in this period. It dropped clear several month ago. Just here in the last few weeks most of the oranges have sunk to the bottom. I'm pretty busy with other beer stuff at the moment but I'm thinking this should be ready for bottling at any time now. Will plan to take care of that some time soon.
- 8/11/18 - Bottled today after a little more than 9 months of conditioning. Measured the gravity as 1.036 which got me to 11% ABV (bread yeast should be proud of the themselves). The spice character is very profound in both aroma and flavor. It is a bit sweet and certainly doesn't taste like it's 11% alcohol. I got 20 12 oz bottles out of the 2 gal batch.
- 1/20/20 - Tasting Notes - Very boldly flavored with a pretty nice complexity. Potent at 11% ABV but hides that very well - probably a combination of the long aging and the residual sweetness. Not a beverage I find myself reaching for on a regular basis but it does make for a nice after dinner drink on a cold winter night.
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