Honey source (mead)??

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Brewmarc

Brewmarc

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Hi
I normally reside at the other end of the forum, with the beer brewers:whistle:
I'm thinking of doing a mead. I've done a couple of small 1 gallon batches a while ago but want to do a five gallon batch:thumb:
Where do you mead makers get your honey from? Is there a reasonably cheap online supplier of honey in bulk?
Otherwise I'll be emptying the supermarket shelves :mrgreen:
 
I buy mine from Alsi or Lidl. Lidl have it on offer at 89p per 340g at the moment. I would like to experiment with more expensive organic honey but have not gotten around to it yet. You could always ferment it out and backsweeten with a more expensive honey. Will be trying that next. Amazon do about 3kg for £20 of organic african honey i think.
 
I usually just use the Tesco everyday value clear honey for 99p a jar although a couple of times I've used the dearer stuff.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
I've used Rowse honey which was nice. Used really cheap blended honey in 2 meads so far. The redcurrant melomel was bitter and horrible, the plum melomel might be going the same way. Guess it's probably the fruit since others here have five results with the same honey.

I've made a hydromel with Tesco finest orange blossom honey, just tasted last night and it's really yummy. My plan going forward is to use a local farms honey when it's in season. Just trying to get a melomel to start from their Heather honey, the standard harvest was poor this year so their base blossom honey was brought up from England.

But I'm also going to use Payne's bulk honey for larger batches as its more economical and they have so many varieties to experiment with.
 
Zephyr259 said:
I've used Rowse honey which was nice. Used really cheap blended honey in 2 meads so far. The redcurrant melomel was bitter and horrible, the plum melomel might be going the same way. Guess it's probably the fruit since others here have five results with the same honey.

I've made a hydromel with Tesco finest orange blossom honey, just tasted last night and it's really yummy. My plan going forward is to use a local farms honey when it's in season. Just trying to get a melomel to start from their Heather honey, the standard harvest was poor this year so their base blossom honey was brought up from England.

But I'm also going to use Payne's bulk honey for larger batches as its more economical and they have so many varieties to experiment with.
Click to expand...

Not had any wine come out bitter so far. How much sugar was there in your recipe? The only fruit wines i have done apart from one are with jam. I did a blackberry mead with1.8kg of honey and 1kg berries and that ended up quite sweet. Will try out the orange blossom. Cheers.
 
Hello mead makers , after 30yrs wine making; i dont know why but i have never got around to mead. I once promised to make some many moons ago, after a few Visits to the monks distillery on Holy Island. I have a kilo and half of Thai wild Bee honey a rich deep Amber colour ,gorgeous stuff, and a kilo and half of local honey., I want to make 2 meads of one gallon (sweet to med sweet)and thought of adding some roasted dried orange peel to one batch. Can the mead makers steer me in the right direction of yeast and method , i have all equipment .bottles ect, i have some lovely half bottles that will be perfect , i will age these for a good while, i have plenty of other stuff to go at. would a Sauternes yeast do the job
 
I've only used Lalvin 71B-1122 and EC-1118 both came out OK. As for method I used go-ferm when hydrating the yeast, and sequential additions of fermaidK (24hrs, 48hrs, 72hrs) which seemed to work as the fermentations went to completion. This may or may not be required, but I was following various US websites and presentations at conferences and also there is a Beersmith podcast interviewing a commercial meadmaker in the US where they are into sequential nutrient additions. Also found the Schramm Complete Meadmaker book useful.
For my 21ltr batch I used 7.7kg of orange blossom honey....it gave a medium/sweet mead.
I also heated my must to 70 C for 15 minutes then cooling before adding the yeast...a lot of people use the honey raw.
http://www.bjcp.org/mead/VarietalMeadComparison.pdf
 
BeerCat said:
Not had any wine come out bitter so far. How much sugar was there in your recipe? The only fruit wines i have done apart from one are with jam. I did a blackberry mead with1.8kg of honey and 1kg berries and that ended up quite sweet. Will try out the orange blossom. Cheers.
Click to expand...

Redcurrant was 2.5kg of currants, 1.36 kg honey, 250ml white grape concentrate. The recipe I was working from wanted 2.25kg fruit and 900g honey but I had extra fruit and 900g honey didn't leave any character so I added an extra jar. After fermenting it was smelled nice, tasted fruity but also quite bitter a month later all the fruit had gone and it just smelled and tasted bad so down the sink it went.

Plum meleomel is a CJJ Berry recipe augmented to a mead base. 2.8 kg of plums, halved and crushed add 2.5L boiling water and leave overnight. Add 1.5L water and pectolase in morning and seems it was left for 2 days at this point from my notes. Strain liquor off fruit pulp and bring to a boil. Add 400g barley (raw, soaked overnight and minced) and 1.8 kg honey. When cooled add amylase. Next morning add nutrient and pitch yeast. It went from 1.094 to 1.000 with D47 yeast, I perceived a slight bitter taste so I stabilised it and added the rest of a jar of honey (~100g). All told it's 10 weeks since I started and it's been stabilised for 2 weeks and clearing steadily, will see how it tastes next time I have some sanitiser on the go, I'm hoping this one improved with age.

My blackcurrant and elderberry wines (no honey) have all worked a treat so the two are a bit anomalous.
 
A kilo and a half of honey will give you 1200g of sugar at 80% content, I've used the Harris yeast successfully with mead and the burnt orange peel sounds good. Just warm up and dissolve the honey and scrape off any scum on top which tend to be proteins and wax. Add tsp of citric and tannin source (tea). Key with the meads are nutrients, 2 tsp to start and an additional tsp of nutrient every 10 days for first month or so. That's about it, it improves over time and often you may need to back sweeten as it will probably get to the low 0.99's with the harris premium yeast after 2 months fermenting. maybe less.

Maybe add the peel at start of ferment, keep some back for after first racking.
 
i am researching two meads Ancient Meads at the minute, Roman Mulsum Honey Wine and Pyment a grape juice honey blend.
 
Tanzanite said:
Hello mead makers , after 30yrs wine making; i dont know why but i have never got around to mead. I once promised to make some many moons ago, after a few Visits to the monks distillery on Holy Island. I have a kilo and half of Thai wild Bee honey a rich deep Amber colour ,gorgeous stuff, and a kilo and half of local honey., I want to make 2 meads of one gallon (sweet to med sweet)and thought of adding some roasted dried orange peel to one batch. Can the mead makers steer me in the right direction of yeast and method , i have all equipment .bottles ect, i have some lovely half bottles that will be perfect , i will age these for a good while, i have plenty of other stuff to go at. would a Sauternes yeast do the job
Click to expand...

TartanSpecial said:
I've only used Lalvin 71B-1122 and EC-1118 both came out OK. As for method I used go-ferm when hydrating the yeast, and sequential additions of fermaidK (24hrs, 48hrs, 72hrs) which seemed to work as the fermentations went to completion. This may or may not be required, but I was following various US websites and presentations at conferences and also there is a Beersmith podcast interviewing a commercial meadmaker in the US where they are into sequential nutrient additions. Also found the Schramm Complete Meadmaker book useful.
For my 21ltr batch I used 7.7kg of orange blossom honey....it gave a medium/sweet mead.
I also heated my must to 70 C for 15 minutes then cooling before adding the yeast...a lot of people use the honey raw.
http://www.bjcp.org/mead/VarietalMeadComparison.pdf
Click to expand...

I agree with @TartanSpecial about the 1118 yeast. I used 2040g of honey (6 340g jars) and ~5L of water for a 1DJ batch. I warmed the jars in hot water and poured into a pot with about 1.5/2l of water and warmed it until runny and mixed added to dj with rest of the water and then rehydrated yeast when cooled.
 
Thanks for your input , i am gradually working out my own recipe from all your peoples ideas along with mine. I am getting there.Razor did the amount of honey you used ferment out sweet or med sweet, i am maybe thinking of fermenting dry then back sweetening with honey . also not sure about the boil some people do maybe just bring to the boil for a couple of mins or not at all ?
 
Tanzanite said:
i am researching two meads Ancient Meads at the minute, Roman Mulsum Honey Wine and Pyment a grape juice honey blend.
Click to expand...

The Muslum wine, just a case of add honey to made medium white wine. Although wouldn't recommend using the lead salts that where in the amphora clay back then, caused the colapse of the civilisation, rather than the lead pipes.

There's lots of recipes for Pyment out there, the main differnce is that it's fermented with the grape, which you probably know.

Tried an ancient greek recipe for herb metheglin an acquired taste that no one else will drink but me.
 
Zephyr259 said:
Redcurrant was 2.5kg of currants, 1.36 kg honey, 250ml white grape concentrate. The recipe I was working from wanted 2.25kg fruit and 900g honey but I had extra fruit and 900g honey didn't leave any character so I added an extra jar. After fermenting it was smelled nice, tasted fruity but also quite bitter a month later all the fruit had gone and it just smelled and tasted bad so down the sink it went.

Plum meleomel is a CJJ Berry recipe augmented to a mead base. 2.8 kg of plums, halved and crushed add 2.5L boiling water and leave overnight. Add 1.5L water and pectolase in morning and seems it was left for 2 days at this point from my notes. Strain liquor off fruit pulp and bring to a boil. Add 400g barley (raw, soaked overnight and minced) and 1.8 kg honey. When cooled add amylase. Next morning add nutrient and pitch yeast. It went from 1.094 to 1.000 with D47 yeast, I perceived a slight bitter taste so I stabilised it and added the rest of a jar of honey (~100g). All told it's 10 weeks since I started and it's been stabilised for 2 weeks and clearing steadily, will see how it tastes next time I have some sanitiser on the go, I'm hoping this one improved with age.

My blackcurrant and elderberry wines (no honey) have all worked a treat so the two are a bit anomalous.
Click to expand...

I feel for you, thats really annoying. I am no expert by a long shot but managed to drink and enjoy all so far which is more than i can say for my beers. I checked and my blackberry mead used 2kg of honey boiled with 500g of berries. Racked after 1month onto 500g more of berries. Used some lemon juice and i think i forgot pectolase. I clear mine with bentonite. That was quite sweet but a nice drink. In future i am going to dry and ferment it dry and backsweeten with honey before i stabilise
 
Not seen a recipe for Retsina mead, lol theres some gorgeous greek wine out there but Retsina an acquired taste so i can imagine the greek mead takes some drinking
 
Tanzanite said:
Not seen a recipe for Retsina mead, lol theres some gorgeous greek wine out there but Retsina an acquired taste so i can imagine the greek mead takes some drinking
Click to expand...

It's a sipper not a quaffer, and then it leaves this after taste that gradually changes and finally draws you back for another glass :)

You must be having some difficulty finding a roman grape variety as no one really knows what the grapes that are mentioned are, just assumptions that they where primitive ancestors of various modern grapes.
 
Tau said:
It's a sipper not a quaffer, and then it leaves this after taste that gradually changes and finally draws you back for another glass :)

You must be having some difficulty finding a roman grape variety as no one really knows what the grapes that are mentioned are, just assumptions that they where primitive ancestors of various modern grapes.
Click to expand...

My guess is it will be some form of muscat , they grow wild every were in greece and on the islands there small very sweet and superb to eat , make fantastic wine ie. samos vin doux
 

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