Tuesday, August 22, 2006
Imas li Medovina?
One of the pleasures of Summer is the making of medovina, basically my recipe is pretty traditional.
5 lb mixed flower, clover or orange flower honey
4 gallons of clean water, tap water is fine, let it sit overnight so the clorine leaves it and boil it if you live in an area with chlorinated water.
half a packet of wine yeast, my preference is for champaigne yeast.
HUGE containment unit, preferably a carboy with all the parafenelija.
If like me you don't have one of those, a five gallon FOOD quality plastic container can be used. What EVER vessels and implements you use to make mead need to be scrupulously clean. Wash everything THREE times. Don't make mead in a household that has a lot of indoor animals or which smells musty, whatever is in the air will get in your mead and make it smell and taste nasty!
It's never happened to me but it's happened to people I know.
Boil one gallon of your water and melt the honey in it, stir it, then add it to the other water in the carboy.
Shake it around some so it aerates, then add half the packet of wine yeast. Shake it around again. put it in a warm place.
Often I use a a box stuffed with clean shredded newspapers or old clean plastic shopping bags to keep it the right temperature. It needs to stay at least 75 degrees F, for three days.Put the lid on it loosely or a thin piece of plastic can go on the carboy or big bottleuse a rubber band to hold it on, put it loosely, the plastic will puff up a little when you need to let out gasses. You are going to need to come around and let out gasses from time to time so it doesn't blow up on you.
I never had mead explode, but I did have raspberry wine explode during a Chinook. It got warm and they began to ferment again!
Mead should ferment vigorously for three days, and after that you can quit worrying so much. From time to time give it a half teaspoon of yeast food. That you can't get in the gulag.
In fact active brewers yeast and wine yeast are unobtainable here now! A friend sent away for yeast and we shared. She paid me for teaching her to make mead by a gift of some packets of yeast! :).
I can't say it often enough check your mead, as often as possible. Listen to it, mead 'sings'
When it's not 'singing' so much you can put it into smaller bottles, this will take maybe six weeks.
Pour all but the dregs into small bottles and put lids on them. aside from checking the pressure in them so they don't blow up, you should not mess with them, the mead should either be pale, or golden coloured when done.
This recipe is used basically from the Baltic to the Balkans.
Some national variations occur, but how I do mead is about how it's done in the Balkans. I have equipment that's a bit rough and ready. Mostly this is because the good equipment is HEAVY and I'm not all that strong.
Now if you want to have some mead that is very strong, you can put a bottle of it in the freezer, and if it's not too viscous to begin with, the water will freeze, it will have a really cool fractal quality, and you can pour off the stronger mead, the first image shows the iced mead, and the second one shows a glass of mead that has not frozen.
If the honey you used for your mead has a lot of wax, then what will happen is you'll get a mead slushy and tthis separation will not occur. The mead slushy however is a real pleasure on a hot day!
You can sometimes, depending how strong your mead came out, do this several times with a batch and have fairly strong mead.
Mead according to the recipe I gave you, should be from 5 % to 16% alchol. Sometimes it can go as high as 20%.
People that visit my place and have had mead I made usually find it better than what they've purchased, there are comercial meaderies, and usually WAY better than what is available at SCA meetings!
Mead is refered to a lot in the epic poems in the Balkans. The word for it in B/H/S is medovina. There is a meadery in Colorado called Medovina. I have not tried their product. They have had favorable reviews online and Boulder seems to have other meaderies these days. I know someone who lived there and he told me mead making is a big deal there, and that my mead even stacks up nicely against what you can get there in Colorado.
I make Rhodomel which is mead with roses, and raspberry mead, a type made in Poland, a country which still produces mead on a commercial scale, and sometimes I put up a bottle of metheglin which has herbs in it, it's a Welsh thing, meant to cure headaches.
Properly made mead will never give you a hangover, but you should not over do it it goes to your legs first if you do drink too much.
Not responsible for any incidents of people going berserk! Not responsible for additions to the family, be forwarned, mead affects male libido as effectively as Viagra and it affects male and female human fertility very favorably as well!
# posted by Katja R. @ 6:15 PM 
