# Recipe please



## chemistbert

I am looking into making a honest to goodness honey water and yeast mead. I am looking for your favorite recipe. Especially yeast preference. I also tend to like a bit of residual sweetness. Thanks!


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## Aspera

5 gallons boiling water + 1/2 tsp DAP
Once water is boiling, turn off the stove and add the dried outer peel of a lemon and about 1.5 gallons of *fresh* orange blossom honey. Cool to 95 F and pitch two packs of D47 (lalvin) Rack into a 7 gal glass carboy and cover the top with saran wrap. After fermentation has begun, add an airlock, and store at 65F. Ferment for 6 months on the lees. Rerack to a five gallon carboy and age another 6 months. Bottle with priming sugar (1 cup) and age 3-12 months in bottles. You can't beat it.


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## Ben Brewcat

Why the saran wrap?


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## Aspera

I don't like to put airlocks on until I know that CO2 is coming out. Tin foil, empty airlocks, cheesecloth etc will work beautifully. Saran wrap is what's on hand, and its virtually sterile.


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## Sport

I have good tasting water here, so what I usually do is just heat the water up enough to disolve the honey, I use 15 lbs, then fill with cool water. This lets you pitch the yeast right away. I also make a starter the day before so the yeast, also Lalvin 47, is going like gang busters when it's pitched. I put the air lock on right away and I'll it bubbling away in about 12 hours. I'll leave it till it clears, 6-12 months, then rack it. I'll usually rack it twice to get it real clear. Then bottle.

I don't use priming sugar, so that it's not carbonated.


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## Aspera

That's fine, but the boiling hot water pasteurizes the honey, DAP and lemon zest. It also gives a beautiful clarity that is hard to achieve otherwise. I forgot to mention that I use the softest spring water possible or distilled water. The mead is sweeter and the flavor finer using soft water with D47. No tannins, salts, sufites or other nutrients should be used is this recipe


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## Sport

No need to pasturize because there are no known pathogins that will grow in 5% alcohol, let alone 12-18%. The thing you want to avoid is off flavors caused by wild yeasts. Having the starter will over come any wild yeast.

As for distilled water, I don't like the flavor of distilled. Go with the best tasting water and you will have a better tasting mead.


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## Ben Brewcat

Well, true enough about the pathogens but it's really the off-flavor causing agents we worry about. An adequate cell count of vigorous, healthy yeast will supress most bad guys more than enough. Folks make great mead both ways. I'll also say that I don't used distilled water, for three reasons 1) expense 2) taste and 3) yeast do need some minerals for optimum health. With a nutrient-based starter (not just rehydration, or starting on honey or juice, see the old thread on starters) you can largely ignore the minerals; the yeast will bring enough "on board" into the mead to do an adequate job on the vast majority of meads. But on high-OG, high-alcohol, low-pH, underpitched or otherwise stressful-environment meads it may become a factor (stuck ferment or underattenuation). My water here is so soft, for example, that I add 10 ppm Mg (and the resultant sulfate) to those musts, and for brewing beer add that plus calcium chloride as a base water for pH management, then adjust to the regional water of the style I'm brewing if additional hardness is indicated. Without that trace of magnesium the yeast were underperforming consistently.


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## clintonbemrose

What is DAP ?
Clint


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## Ben Brewcat

Di Ammonium Phosphate, yeast energizer. It's a nitrogen source only.


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## Aspera

The honey has enough zinc and Mg. I specifically want my yeast to "underperform" The result is a rather low attenuation and many complex saccarides characteristic of a nice sweet mead with a beautiful floral aroma. Distilled water has no nutrients, odor or flavor. D47 when given nutrients beyond what the honey supplies will create a drier, chardonnay like mead and does not age as well sur lee. The only thing that I would ever change about this recipe would be the zest (sometimes ginger is nicer) or to alter the volume of honey based on its specific gravity and your tastes. 

P.S. Orange blossom is a *must* here, and sulfites really make the aroma pretty wonky, esp if you intend to carbonate this mead.


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## Aspera

..that and how I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb....


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## Ben Brewcat

Purity Of Essence! Good mead segue. That's a really good point Aspera; somehow I hadn't really thought about the Mg from honey. Even a dark honey would at dilution provide maybe 10 ppm; probably good to get them started. I've never played with manipulating attenuation below potential in meads, though we certainly stress yeasts like that in beer brewing for estery British ales or Belgians.


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## chemistbert

How about a recipe for just water honey and yeast then? Especially the choice of yeast.


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## Ben Brewcat

Oh, sure, fine. Keep a Beesource thread on-topic  . OK, a little residual sweetness: what kind of alcohol content are you looking for? That will help us pick a yeast strain. As you can see Lalvin's D-47 is a popular go-to guy. 

Also read the Introduction to Meadmaking, which has a section on recipe formulation for exactly this. Basically once you know desired sweetness and alcohol levels, it's just math and yeast strain selection. Let us know where you'd like to land between refreshing lawnmower mead and rocket-fuel panty-loosener and we can dial you right in with some suggestions.


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## Aspera

Chemistbert,

You can use the recipe above, just omit the lemon zest and DAP. It really isn't necessary. Depending on your taste, you may want to change the lower the honey/water ratio a bit if you do this, b/c yeast without a nitrogen source attenuates very quickly, causing many "stuck" fermentations. DAP, egg white, yeast extract, malt, yeast hulls and pollen are all reasonable nitrogen sources. D47 is an excellent choice for a variety of meads b/c it does well in low nitrogen environments. I also like 1118 for drier/higher alcohol meads, and the two yeasts blend well together, especially if D47 is used first. 1116 ages quickly, finishes dry and does't taste too bad either. This strain rapidly eats other dead yeasts and seems to require little to no nutrients, but may produce some really bad hangovers if used in this manner.

[ January 16, 2007, 04:48 PM: Message edited by: Aspera ]


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## nursebee

Choose a yeast with known tolerance. Add honey above the tolerance for it. This creates a sweat mead. How hot with ETOH do you want it?


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## chemistbert

Mostly what I am after is 12-13% with a nice neutral yeast. I don't like some of the yeasts that leave flavors. Thanks!


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## markalbob

If you want a "pure" mead, about 3-3.5 pounds honey per gallon and D47 or Narbonne yeast.

Expect a lot of off flavors if you avoid nutrients, ideally add DAP and also ghostex or similar. Personally I say do NOT heat the honey, sulfite the must instead--same pasteurization, less blowoff of aromatics.

If you want a less pure, but probably somewhat better-behaved mead, go for (for 5 gallons) the same yeast and nutrients, 1 gallon honey in 3-4 gallons apple juice--the apple juice is mild enough to lose all character in fermentation (the aromatics bubble out or get consumed, either way, it tastes like mead, not apple juice, when done), but it provides a bit less hostile environment than just honey.

One last note, if you look on a site like "gotmead", very few people like to use champagne yeast for anything but a dry mead--no point in making a 18% alcohol, 3% sugar mead unless you just like rocket fuel--if you want a sweet mead that reminds you of a "wine", D47 and Narbonne both go to 12-14% alcohol, the difference between 14 and 18-20% is quite noticable.


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## chemistbert

Aspera, You mention pollen as a nitrogen source. How would I go about using that?


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## markalbob

bert, everything I've heard has been that mead is a bit touchy, and you are best supplementing the nitrogen......attenuation less the concern than harsh and unwanted "off" flavors. I'm not so sure I'd want to do it with yeast myself, but to each their own.....also not at all sure I'd want to bottle a "sweet" + "carbonated" mead--if you can prime and get an additional fermentation to add "fizz", eventually you're risking a bottle bomb. 

I just had lasik 2 years ago; I happen to really like my eyes......Aspera sounds as though he has experience, I cannot argue it, but he's doing a 180 from most of what I've seen and some of the ideas just don't mesh with my personal experience. No offense, just adding my 2 cents as well.....


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## chemistbert

It just peaked my interest is all. I'll probably cave in and go ahead with DAP but this whole subject is of interest to me.


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## Ben Brewcat

I think it's an interesting idea too. I don't know enough about pollen chemistry to speculate on it's availability for yeast metabolism, but it's a cool idea. My next batch is probably a few months out, but an experiment suggests itself: prepare a batch, an off-dry, semisweet or sweeter would be ideal, and pitch your fungus of choice. Immediately plit the batch into equal volumes and to one add, I dunno, two to three tablespoons finely ground pollen. Rack on the same schedule and store together to minimize differences across the batches. Perhaps someone smarter than I could speculate on whether boiling the pollen would make its constituent components more available (denaturing the proteins and dissolving the pellets) or degrade the good stuff too much.

Then compare the attenuation level when they finish. Preliminarily one could speculate that if the pollened batch attenuates more fully to a significant degree, then the pollen may have been of benefit. Pitching rehydrated yeast without a starter would be best, to try to isolate the effect of the pollen.

Any takers? Say what ever happened to that experimental honeyed kombucha?

Now we can start a thread on whether adding pollen to mead makes it an evil, chemical-laden "cheater's" mead or whether it's a crunchy granola-mongers best friend that you could still call "natural"  .


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## Ben Brewcat

I thought I'd bump and stick this thread; it's getting around time to make some varietals with early honey harvests or make some quick meads for the holidays. If we keep one thread with folk's recipe recommendations it'll make searching a little easier. Prost!


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## nursebee

Read the Schramm book. Nuff said


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## chemistbert

I think this fall calls for an experiment. I'll collect some nice fall pollen and then make up a 2 gallon batch of mead. I'll split right after pitching the yeast into two one gallon bottles. I'll add pollen to one and nothing to the other. In 6 months I'll try it and test for attenuation. Wish me luck! 

Or maybe three one gallon, one with boiled pollen.......


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## Ben Brewcat

I like the boiled pollen idea; some bugs (that might hitch in on the pollen) can over-attenuate, that is, can ferment more than the pitched yeast would have, giving a potentially misleading attenuation. Keep us posted and thanks!


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## chemistbert

So what I really need is to have some of my pollen irradiated then. Hadn't thought about that. I'll need to call Geneva College and see is they have that ability. Thanks for pointing that out.

Matt


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## Ben Brewcat

Oh, I don't know if I'd go to that trouble (though I suppose it'd be ideal). Must be nice having access to that kind of equipment!


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## Aspera

With regard to the idea of heating removing aromatics, I say, "poppycock!" The blowoff of CO2 from fermentation removes far more aromatics than heated water ever would. The clarity and additional available aminos that comes from **adding cool honey to recently boiled water** is unsurpassed. Also, boiling precipitates unwanted solutes, removes solubilized chlorine gas and provides superior sanitation. The chief drawbacks are time and energy consumed, not adverse flavor effects. I always boil my water, even if I intend to use it cold the next day. In the case of pectin-rich fruits, heat pasteurization is contraindicated, but not because of flavor....only because of pectins. Even for wine concentrate kits, I don't think that adding concentrate to recently boiled water is so terrible provided you don't "set" the pectins or carmelize sugars. Sulfites are for lazy wine makers. The true mazer boils his water. This is a technique that is ageless, pre-dating sulfer candles and so forth.


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## Ben Brewcat

Hey Aspera, can you tell us a little more about the increased amino acids' availability from having boiled the water? Not familiar with that, and always learning!


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## Aspera

Proteins are often unavailable or undigestible to yeast until they are denatured and partially hydrolyzed. Additionally, some proteins are physically packaged in material which make them less bioavailable (eg the silica shell of raw pollen in the field). Yeast, as it turns out only needs small amounts of free A.A.'s and has no requirements for peptides (which bacteria loooove). My reasoning is that the more peptides and proteins you can denature, destroy, hydrolyze and digest, the the better. It will make free nitrogen available, reduce or eliminate the need for DAP and reduce the likelihood of bacterial contaminants. If you have a low gravity mead and feel that it needs sulfites for stability/freshness, you can always add them later. I also feel that heat, cleanliness, and a low pH do more for sanitation and stability than pounds of sulfites ever could.


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## HVH

Can you guys tie together the topic of cooking and clarity? I read many years ago that people often cook their honey, skim the scum, and then ferment in order to provide a clear finished product. I have also read that cooked honey can lend a bitter flavor to mead. If you don't cook, is fining needed?


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## Ben Brewcat

As a new subject this might be better served as a new thread.


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## HVH

Ben Brewcat said:


> As a new subject this might be better served as a new thread.


If the original post in this thread was how to go about making mead from just honey, water and yeast, and someone else brings up "to cook or not to cook" it seems that the clarity of the finished product and possible bitterness are relevant.


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## Ben Brewcat

Sorry, no intent to chastise! Just a suggestion that a boiling/clarity thread might get a little more traffic than the thread for sharing recipes.


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## HVH

Ben Brewcat said:


> Sorry, no intent to chastise! Just a suggestion that a boiling/clarity thread might get a little more traffic than the thread for sharing recipes.


Thanks for the kind response.


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## roger eagles

*boiling*

I tried some mead and turned out great.Put in freezer till ice crystals started,then drank.Construction crew loved it.I only heat it lately to 140.I never boil it.Just enuff to kill the main bacteria.Works for me but heated it with the water.


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## Aspera

If your goal is to pasteurize, then I would suggest preboiling your water, removing it from the burner and then adding the honey. This works well and prevents any chance of scorching the honey or allowing waterborne bacteria to survive. The honey will cool down the mixture to the right temp. For instance:

24 lbs water @ 200 F = 4800 lbs*degrees
+ 18 lbs @ 70 F = 1260 lbs*degree

= 6060 lbs degrees/44 lbs = about 137 degrees


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## roger eagles

*nice*

Nice,I like that.Thanks


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