Jao The Ultimate Beginners Mead Recipe

[The hop cartel]

Do you use nutrients?

Steeped orange peel in black tea and 1 add about 20 to 30 chop raisins to the Must

 

[The hop cartel]

 

[dozerz]

tasted my traditional last night after 8 weeks in primary and is fantastic. plan to cold crash it then oak it for a week. depending on the outcome may do cinnamon and vanilla before carbing.

 

[AshleyDoran]

So, I made a batch of JAO around 6 years ago, froze it to remove most of the water content, bottled it with some more honey and then left it.

6 years later, I have somthing that almost tastes like honey port. this is just a little bottle but I still have about 3 liters of it left.

My next plan it to introduce some oak flavor to finish, and then add a vanilla pod as I put them in their final bottles.

this recipe, if you can be patient, is well worth the effort.

 

[iamacup]

Hi folks,
Thread necro for the mead makers.
I'm pretty new to brewing and I made a JAO as my first ever brew and i used balloons for airlocks. Now I've just bottled a kit brew I'm going to take some of the Suburban honey my bees produce and go for a slightly more complex mead. Looking forward to reading these 40 somewhat pages of advice and will report in when i have more of an idea of what I'm doing.

Regards,

Cup

 

[Joely]

Steeped orange peel in black tea and 1 add about 20 to 30 chop raisins to the Must

Can we please move away from the myth that raisins add nutrients. They don't do anything except provide additional sugars. Treat your yeast right from the start and you will have the best mead at the end. Temp control, know your FAN to calculate your YAN and stagger nutrient doses throughout the 1/3 sugar break.

 

[Hugh Coleman]

I’ve already brewed a few traditional meads, a couple of traditional sand some fruited ones. I thought I’d give this a go and followed the recipe to the letter! Used Lowans instant dried yeast that I nicked from my wife, assuming it might go to around 11 or 12%.
I don’t know where it started because the recipe says not to measure the IG. But it finished at 1.004 specific gravity.
And jeesus is it bitter to the taste! Wholly undrinkable.

Possible causes.
A) the honey I used was not as high in fermentable sugars as it might have been.
B) the yeast mutated over the eight weeks it sat in primary and went past the 11-12%.
C) the orange I used was too pithy (I could only get hold of a large navel orange at the time I decided to make this).

In any case, I’m going to persist with it and try back sweetening with honey to see if it can be rescued.

Cheers,

Hugh