There is something truly fascinating about meadmaking. Being a 'foodie', I can appreciate the amalgamation of ingredients rendering their individual flavors towards a consolidated end product. But in the end, jambalaya is still rice, chicken, sausage, and various spices. With mead, though, you have water, honey, yeast and some type of yeast food - be it lemons, raisins, or something else -- becoming something completely different. Just as the alchemist of yesteryear, meaders are wizards of transformation.
I have toyed with the idea of meadmaking for many years, but it wasn't until I met my partner-in-crime Ben Rooney that the idea flourished into reality. Smitten by the mead fairy, we both set forth to create the most ass-kicking, mouth-watering concoction known since the Pathfinders were splitting skulls throughout the world. Berserker Mead was born.
Being from Indiana, we thought it would be a good idea to use only locally-grown, mostly organic products in our mead. For our first two batches, we selected pure natural honey from Dutch Country, an apiculture farm in Middlebury, Indiana that sells their amazing product at the American Countryside Farmers Market in Elkhart. Their primary honey is a wildflower honey and it has a strong, full-body texture and smokey fragrance, definitely stronger than any clover honey I have ever encountered.
Our mead uses between 3 1/2 and 4 gallons of spring water -- not drinking, purified-by-reverse-osmosis crap -- and we selected Absopure from a spring near Plymouth, Michigan. Absopure proved to be taste-free and pure, perfect for mead!
Organic lemons (batch 0001) and pineapples (batch 0002) were used as yeast food. It was our intent to make a batch of more traditional mead and a melomel (mead made with any fruit) using my favorite fruit: pineapple.
Prepping for making the must is the fun part of the whole process. We take the measurements, the timing, and the steps pretty seriously, but it has to be fun. After all, we're bootleggers, not scientists. I never heard of any bootleggers that paid much attention to the seriousness of boozemaking. In fact, you have to be out of your mind to be making your own alcohol, especially of the bathtub-gin kind.
Speaking of bathtub, that's where we warm our honey up. We don't boil our must. We find that adding heat to the process takes away some of the character of the honey and/or the fruit, or some other such nonsense. But the fact of the matter is, pouring cool honey will take you forever. And who has time for that? Those shots of Stoli won't drink themselves. Warming up the honey pre-pouring makes the honey flow much more freely and rapidly.
As the honey takes a bathee, we mix the yeast with warm-to-hot water. It's important to leave the mixture seating for around 15 minutes without whisking it. Let the yeast absorb the water and become active.
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| Rooney pretending to know what the hell he is doing |
Sanitation -- very important! You don't want impurities, boogers, and other types of pestilence to infiltrate your nectar of the norse gods. Remember that mead is a fermenting beverage. Bacteria lives in it, broheim, and you don't want listeria doing the nasty with your Lalvin 71B-1122 (that's the yeast we use, for you, the uncultured plebes.) We sanitize everything: the ale pail, the hydrometer and thermometer, all the tools, our hands, and just in case, our nether regions. Nah, that sounds too much like a case of teh ghey. Scratch that. But basically everything that comes in contact with the must (the primary mix that will eventually become the mead) gets sterilized
idiot's luck magic because our must achieves a temperature of around 70 degrees, which is perfect.
We hold the bottle a few feet from the ale pail so the honey oxygenates on its way down into the water. Oxygen and fermentation are great allies, especially in the beginning of the mead's life.
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| "Hey..hey pineapple!" "WHAT??" "Knife." |
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After we mix the honey and the water well, we add the fruit. I chose pineapple because I love it as a fruit and like to sleep with one in my pants and it is not too acidic. I was hoping to get a high ABV (alcohol-by-volume) and I read somewhere that pineapple is mildly acidic, which in turn helps to produce mead with a higher proof. As we also learned, the pineapple mass is higher than that of lemons, and therefore we used less water than in our first batch. So, more honey + less water + fruit less acidic should produce a sweeter, more alcoholic mead. And that sounds like music to our ethylic ears.
Then, the ceremonial yeast pitch. Now, if any of this sounds like a couple of morons making grog, this is where meadmaking becomes truly magic. Without yeast, it's just water and honey. I suppose that eventually this mess would ferment, but yeast turns this mixture into alcohol -- which is what, of course, this is all about.
For the ceremonial pitch yeast, I like to work myself into a trance and a state of total awareness. Odin and Loki would have no less. I pray an ancient prayer to the norse gods as I long for Ragnarok to submerge the world in water forever (at least, that what Wikipedia says.)
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| Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn |
After a few more minutes whisking the final mixture, we lock the ale pail and add an airlock. Now, if you ever attempt to make mead and you lock your pale without an airlock, not only you'll have the equivalent of a mead bomb in your basement, but I will personally come to your abode and beat you to death with a carboy. The airlock helps you keep an eye on the fermentation without having to open the pail up all the time. You want your must to stay active and bubbly and the airlock allows you to observe that. It won't bubble right away, as I found out in total disappointment, but give it 12 hours and you should see the fruits of your labor bubble away.
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| Our first batch. We opened it to check its gravity and it exuded a beautiful aroma of lemons and dead kittens |
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There are some meadmakers out there that log their batches' specific gravity, ABV, and PH every 6 hours, and still they run into problems with musts that stop bubbling, low fermentation, and what have you. Bubble intervals? No way! We check it once a day and if they bubble every few seconds, we figure we're in business. We checked our first batch's gravity two weeks after it went into the pail. Now, don't think for a second we're careless. If something catastrophic happened, like a must that stops fermenting after a couple of days, we would take the appropriate measures to kick-start it back to life; but for the most part, we let nature take its course. After all, that's how meadmaking started: out of young shepherd's blind luck as his goats looked all fucked-up after drinking the water out of a puddle under an apple tree. And who are we to mess with that?
