Editors note: This publication contains a lightly edited transcript of the question and answer portion of the corresponding lecture.
Image attribution: Siona Karen, CC BY 2.0. Accessed from Wikimedia Commons.
Question: If your honey is already crystallized, is that something we can use?
Jereme: Yes, actually, that means that it's a good honey to use. A good, raw, natural honey will actually crystallize naturally, especially if it gets cold. Natural crystallized honey means that it hasn't had a lot of extra filtering done to it. It just means it's a good honey. Sometimes that takes a little extra work. One thing I didn't really talk about during the talk is temperature in mead making. If you happen to be a beer brewer, there's a fair amount of boiling and cooking involved.
You pretty much want your honey to be nice and warm — basically body temperature. If your honey is crystallized, the best way to get it ready for mead is to either warm your water up to just not boiling, but fairly warm. You can either warm it up first or blend your honey in like that. Sometimes if I have a jar of honey that's crystallized, or that is maybe not crystallized but still pretty thick, I'll warm up a pot of water, turn the heat off, and then set the jar in the water and let that warm.
So short answer: Yes, you can definitely use crystallized honey, and it's one of the better types of honey to use.
Question: How long do you usually set your mead to ferment?
Jereme: When I do my longer classes I can go in a little more detail on that. There are a lot of possible answers. It depends on what what type of mead you're making. If you go to the very beginning, say you're making a wild ferment, or you're just adding your own commercial yeast, that will take a couple of days to about a week to really start fermenting. At that point, it's fermenting, it's still pretty sweet, it's maybe slightly alcoholic. Historically, in a lot of the ancient mead making, they would start drinking it at this stage.
Tej, for example, they'd just open ferment it, and over time it becomes less sweet and more alcoholic. If it's left in that open fermentation eventually it starts to become sour.
If you want to bottle your semi-sweet mead, which is about that two and a half to three pounds per gallon of water, it will take maybe a month or two to really ferment to the full amount of alcohol, but it's going to take another month or two to really fully ferment to where you can feel safe bottling it, because if you bottle too soon with all that CO2, you've potentially got corks popping and bottles exploding. This can happen, but only if you go away for too long.
My short answer to the questions is: Anywhere from one week to five years, for drinking. So with a really basic, ancient style mead, you can start sipping on it whenever. If you want to really fully ferment a high-alcohol mead and bottle it, those usually benefit from time in the bottle. If you're using less honey to make more of a beer-like mead, those can be fully fermented and drinkable in under a month. Other types can take a few months. It just depends on the amount of honey. Amount of honey primarily is what it depends on, and some yeasts ferment honey faster than others.
Question: I imagine it probably has something to do with temperature, as well, right? If you're trying to ferment this in the dead of winter in Michigan, that might take a bit longer?
Jereme: Yeah, I mean, as long as you're keeping it near a heater vent, or something like that, or if you're keeping it somewhere that is nice and warm. But even doing that, I do find that meads I'm fermenting in the winter can take a little longer. I've got to be a little more patient with them. And I should also mention that 70-ish degrees, a little higher, closer to 80 degrees Fahrenheit is ideal.
High temperatures (90-100 degrees) can potentially cause flavors you don't like. Again, that also depends a little bit on yeast. There's a Norwegian yeast called kveik that's mostly for beer that you can use with mead, it prefers 90 to 100 Fahrenheit. So it will ferment at warmer temperatures. If you go too cold, say 50 degrees Fahrenheit or below, it's basically going to sit there and will be dormant until you get it warm again.
Question: How do you stop that fermentation to make the sweet mead? So you've got it to a stage that it's nice and sweet, or however you like it. How do you get it to put the brakes on?I assume that's when you bottle it, chill it, halt it in its tracks.
Jereme: Well, that is a tough one to answer. It's not really tough to answer, there are just some options available, and it depends on how technical you want to be and how much patience you have. Some yeasts, depending on the amount of honey, eventually will just say, “OK, I'm done.” And you'll have some residual sweetness.
I have a fairly good idea of how sweet or dry I want mine to be in the end and adjust my recipe accordingly. I just watch it, let it go, and kind of by instinct I generally know when it's done. But you can also tell when it's really clarified, when it's really still and you don't see any kind of CO2 bubbles, then it's done or mostly done. Sometimes it looks like it's done but it's not. To test that, there's a burning piece of equipment called a hydrometer that tests the gravity. So there's high gravity when you first do it because of all that heavy honey. When it ferments out, its low.
But as far as just stopping it, there are things you can buy at homebrew stores. Calcium — I can't remember exactly what it is, because I don't really use it. There's kind of sulfide sort of thing, and even with those sometimes they don't fully stop.
One other thing that a lot of people try, if it's cold out, or if you have space in a refrigerator, is cold crashing. That is kind of like lautering a beer, which is fermenting cold. Cold crashing is when you take the fermentation that is close to being done (or you like the flavor) and you stick it somewhere really cold for a few days, maybe not in a full-on freezer, but 30 degrees or so Fahrenheit. Not much lower than that though. This will freeze the yeast that is left. It'll drop down, it'll clarify more. Fully stopping fermentation is not always a super easy thing to do. So I mostly just exercise patience.
Question: How do you store mead? What's the best way to go about that?
Jereme: It sounds like we might be talking about once it's been bottled. Before its finished, you can intentionally ferment it somewhere a little cooler to slow down the fermentation.
Once it's ready —once it's been bottled — I have a basem*nt, so that I can cellar it. So basically, somewhere cellar temperature, if you can. If you live in an apartment or don't quite have that, just find a cool spot of your house, even just a closet or a pantry, or something kind of set somewhere in the back. Direct sunlight will actually affect the flavor over time, even if it isn’t in direct sunlight. You want it just somewhere cool and dark.
And always, no matter how careful you are with bottling, I still always put it in a box, covered up with something. Sometimes fermentation is unpredictable, and maybe I'll have a weak bottle, or it'll just ferment more than I expected in the bottle. Just be prepared. I've heard stories about people hiding their mead off somewhere in a closet, and then a cork pops, or they actually have an explosion or something and — Yikes. A mead bomb. Nobody wants a mead bomb. So it's always good to put it in a covered box somewhere nice and cool, and forget about it for a while.
Question: What's your favorite mead?
Jereme: Yeah, that's another one that's always tough. Because I'm a beer brewer, my personal favorites are bragots and session meads. Bragots, as I mentioned, are basically beer with honey in it. So it's kind of a beer mead sort of a thing.
Session meads, have lower alcohol content, about a beer level. They can be anywhere from like 5% to 7%. And they're usually a little fizzy. A lot of meads are flat. But I do also occasionally, as kind of a treat, make a higher alcohol mead — 12% or even higher. It's a tough one.
There are also metheglins, which can have tons of different flavors in them. Usually I make a spiced metheglin. So I'll do things like cinnamon and cloves. That's a good one to drink in the winter, especially. Sometimes I'll make a hot toddy out of it, or I'll warm it up and do a mulled mead. Those are probably at the top of my list, I guess.
