3 Steps to Prepare a Mixed Berry Mead

There may not be only three steps in preparing to make a mixed berry mead, but I took care of 3 today. Take a look at the photos I snapped today.

1. One of the first things you need to do is to get yourself a large jug of honey. This is a 12 pound container of honey that I bought from Northern Brewer.

Orange Blossom honey is supposed to be great to use in a berry mead or melomel. I used clover last time and I thought that was ok. Again, buying honey in bulk is not cheap and the Orange blossom variety is more expensive than clover or wildflower so I am hoping the extra money can be tasted in the mead.

2. If it is a melomel, then you need to get fruit, specifically berries. Some people swear by fresh berries, but frozen ones work well for me. Their cells walls have been busted open so their flavor comes in strong in the mead. It gives me the advantage of making mead out of season.

Again, even with a four gallon recipe, you do need a large amount of fruit if you want a strong berry flavor rather than just a hint or touch of fruit in your mead. I went to Trader Joe’s to buy some packages today. Too bad they didn’t have everything I needed. I will have to go elsewhere for the cherries and the blackberries that the recipe calls for.

Bonus: I have some wild black raspberries that I picked last summer and froze for this recipe.

3. If there was one thing that I learned from the last mead I made, it was that seeds are hard to remove. It took many rankings to get the mead to clarify. This time, I have fine mesh bags that I will use with this time around to keep the seeds out of the mead which should reduce the number of times I have to rack it.

These are the three steps I followed today. There are more for sure, but I will write about them when I make it later on this week.

Mead On.

See the details of the mead making day.