Catching up, mead style
What do you do when everything is buried under snow and ice? We’ve got a farming blog to keep going, and there isn’t a whole lot of farming going on. A little bit of home improvement happening, but that’s not so blog-worthy. I did take some pictures of my plum mead when I made it awhile back, and I’m sipping on a little bit of it tonight, wondering what direction it is going, so I thought I’d post a little something about that.
The tree in our front yard turned out to be a plum tree, which was very exciting to us, not having the benefit of talking to the previous owner when we bought the place. I made a big 5-gallon batch of ginger plum wine in September, and it is coming right along. It’s my first batch of wine, so I don’t really know how to judge it. I suppose if I can drink it, that’s a start.
Mead is a more elegant art, a family trade passed down by my dad to my brother Alex, and now to me. Captain Shafer and I went to a mead and cider clinic at Larry’s Homebrew down in Kent this fall, and it was a good overview of the process, replete with mysterious contradictions and a sense of reverence toward the conversion of honey to alcohol. Standard clover honey was bashed, so I went with a blackberry honey from Madison Market, plus a few bags of plums we had in the freezer.
All in all, it seems like it’s on the way. It’s still a little sweet, which tells me the fermentation might be stuck, but I’m OK with that for now. I’m going to leave it in the carboy and just see what happens in the next month or so. Maybe add a little honey and see if anything happens.
Plus, I was out of acid, so there is no added tartness in the recipe so far. I’m not really missing it too much, but I might throw in a lemon or two. And it’s pretty murky, especially compared to the ginger plum wine. Hopefully it will clear up eventually.
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We just had a friend over to dinner on Saturday and he was talking about making a really bad batch of mead. He said it wasn’t sweet at all and blamed the yeast. I’d never heard of mead and here it is again. Funny.
Mead that isn’t sweet at all is definitely a problem. Basically, any yeast is going to eat all the sugar unless it’s a super high alcohol mead (at a certain point the yeast can’t keep converting sugar to alcohol and it stays sweet). So dry meads are very common for the lowly homebrewer.
It’s not really a problem to let your mead run dry. Let it run dry, crash & stabilize it with Campden tablets, and then back-sweeten to taste. It does require a little more bulk-aging though when it runs clear down to a specific gravity under 1.100 though.
I’d recommend visiting GotMead.com if anyone is curious about the modern methods of making excellent meads. Even better would be to borrow or buy Ken Schramm’s Compleat Meadmaker.