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Mixed Berry Mead Making

Making mead is pretty easy as compared to brewing beer. I made a 4 gallon batch last night in under an hour, including clean-up. Not that 5 gallons would be added time to the session (I only made 4 gallons to keep costs within my budget), but I can tell you once you close the lid on the fermentor after pitching the yeast into your must you start to wonder why you don’t do this more often.

Here are some photos I took of the session. Following my recipe for a mixed berry mead, I had a good number of bags (the sum of their contents was 10 pounds) to spray with sanitizer and open up. These bags were left in the fridge to defrost so pouring the fruit from the bags to the bucket was quick and painless. The ziplock bag is my harvest of black raspberries.

Frozen Fruit Bags Standing Up and Santized

I sanitized the scissors I used to cut the bags open. To ensure proper transfer of fruit from the bag to the bucket, sit the bag up so all the fruit sits at the bottom and make sure you cut across the whole top of the bag.

The recipe calls for 2.5 gallons of water and 9.5 pounds of honey. The water was easy enough to measure; I bought a large container held exactly that amount. The honey was little more challenging.

With a container filled with 12 pounds of honey and a scale that only measures up to 5 pounds, I had to take my measurement after I poured honey into the fermentor.

After the first pour, I was pretty close.

First shot at the honey amount

After the second pour, I was a little over.

Second shot at the honey amount

Nobody complained about having a little more honey in the recipe, right?  The next step was to add the berries. To eliminate needing to deal with berry bits and seeds at the end of primary fermentation, I put a sanitized mesh bag in the bucket and used an elastic band to hold it in place. Once it was secure, I poured all my berries into the bag and after I was done it looked like this medley of berry goodness:

Berries for the Mead

With the berries added in, I took off the elastic and tied the bag in a knot.

Berries all tied up in the mesh bag
This berries in a bag method is something I saw Curt Stock do. After I rack to a secondary, I will let you know how it worked. With the water, honey, and berries sitting pretty together, I pitched my yeast and my nutrient/energizer.
Lalvin Narbonne 71-B 1122 Yeast

I didn’t proof the yeast. With two packets, I felt like I was covered and yes, I was being lazy.

Not noted in the recipe, I added some pectic enzyme (2 teaspoons) to help with the clarity of the mead.

Again, it was very quick to set up and clean up. If you haven’t made a mead, you should try it at least once.

Note: This morning, the fermentation was going strong. Tonight, I will add a little more nutrient and energizer and then again at 48 hours and probably mid-week next week following a staggered addition schedule that I wrote up in the recipe.

Read more about the set up of this mead making day.

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2 Comments

  1. Daniel

    Nice article! Will probably be very nice mead. =)
    One thing I dont get is why you sanitize everything in contact with the berries except the berries themselves. I get that you want to fight infection, but unless the berries were somehow sterilized it is all kind of wasted. All fruit and berries have tons of microorganisms living on them (and probably in them) and they will definitely survive the freezer. Sanitizing scissors to open a bag of regular berries is like washing your socks and then sticking them into dirty boots (for lack of a better metaphor).
    However, I think the mead will be just fine even without sanitizing, most of the stuff on the berries will probably do no harm at all.

  2. I most cases frozen berries are often flash pasteurized. So in essence they have been sanitized for you. The hand picked berries, not so much, but once fermentation gets started and the alcohol get up to 10% or more there really is no worries.

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