How long does it take to ferment out the mead is 12 weeks a realistic time ?
Primary Fermentation can take up to 9 months or longer. Using 1/3rd sugar break and nutrient additions you can bring the fermentation time down to 2 to 3 weeks. My Ancient Orange is a very old school without nutrient additions and its still slowly plopping away in the cupboard.
Mead brings home very quickly that the job of a brewer is not to "make beer" or "make wine" or "make mead". The job of the brewer is to "make an environment for yeast to thrive in". Once you make the environment perfect for yeast your main job is done and your fermentation time drops. Extreme in Mead because honey is a virtual wasteland of nutrition, pH and buffering for yeast and is a high gravity environment putting a lot of hydrostatic pressure on the yeast cells. You don't like it down at the deep end of the pool with your ears hurting, neither do the yeast.
Have you a special source for your Honey ?
Farm, one of the larger honey farms supplying the bulk packers for NSW. I'm lucky that its a 26 minute drive away from my location.
What do you have to look for in a good honey for mead? .
Aroma, flavour
. Anything you think smells really really nice or has a really nice taste will be a good candidate for Mead. If you have a skunky honey you will not be able to make anything better than a skunky Mead. The quality of ingredients is the limiting factor, but the better quality you put in the better quality you get out at the end. You can never increase the quality over the original ingredients.
That cuts out pasteurised blends shoved into the supermarket for joe average consumer. And cuts out cooking honey.
Raw rule of thumb is lighter honeys make better mead than darker ones. Contrary to that rule from America, you get some Dark honeys that have very light delicate and non offensive or strong flavours and you can get light honeys that are just strong, nasty and foul! Ask any bee keeper and he will tell you that from the same bee hive you'll get different colour honey throughout the season, usually progressively darker as the season goes on.
The Compleat Meadmaker has data on Eucalyptus honey, but thats the problem, it was performed in the US and its just "eucalyptus honey" not a break down of all the various eucalyptus varieties on offer in Australia. The common opinion of Eucalyptus over in America is they make medicinal tasting mead. I'd take that advice with a grain of salt. They probably have a highly pasteurized honey shipped over there and left in the warehouse for quite a while before clearing the shops.
Iron Bark is used by bee keeper / mead makers. I'm using Stringy Bark as well. The Iron Bark I have is clear almost water like. The Stringy Bark I have is darker.
Honey is a degrading quality ingredient, the fresher the better, the more it sits the more it is not as preferred for Mead Making, though it still goes great on toast and in food products.
Honey is also full of more than a hundred flavours, each at different levels or even not in other honeys. There is also technically no "Variety" of honey. Iron Bark may be made by hives where more of the flowers are Iron Bark that are collected by the Bees but other flowers and nectars are also collected and go into the honey. Location, time of season, its a very varied world out there in honey land! Another reason not to go for bulk statements about quality of a particular honey for Mead from someone 1/2 way around the world in another country.
How much does it cost for mead in Bulk .?
Honey in Bulk?
Depends on your supplier. If you deal with a large farm, they deal with primary producer rates to packers. If you get some small guy packing his backyard honey into tiny jars and tying bits of fancy cloth around the jars you'll pay premium for it. $15 and higher per kilo.
Farms supplying bulk to us are really supplying small one offs (a bucket or two) when they are used to filling up gigantic HDPE cubes that go on trucks. Again the price will fluctuate on variety of honey and the farms location to how much of a specific variety they have left to shift. To a mead maker, expect about $5 per kilo for the quantities we buy. In the supermarket you'll be paying about $10-12 per kilo for that same honey but not as fresh and you don't know if its been pasteurized.
Farms to bulk packers in large volumes are going to be lower in per kilo cost, near $3.20 or so.
That said, if you get into it, you'll be wanting your own bee hives in the back yard next. With 100-120 kilos of honey made a season you will have an absolute bounty load of honey to make mead with if you do not care about a specific varietal and are ok with having wildflower honey as your base for making Mead. At $5 per kilo our price, you can easily see a big savings in running your own hives. Two of those will save you more than your Rudd money each year in honey for Mead. If you spent your Rudd money kitting yourself out with Bee Hives and gear you'll make it back the first year and every year after is a perpetual Rudd money giveaway in liquid gold instead of plastic cash.
Not necessarily. However it is easiest that way. For the utmost in consistency you program in your desired ABV and ferment out dry. Then stabilise and back sweeten as necessary at the end. You can try and target a finish in the sweet range, but until you really know your strain of yeast and your honeys and technique you have quite a bit of variability that could put you into overly sickly sweet if attenuation does not go to plan.
The easiest method of all is to bulk ferment then rack to smaller vessels to do your flavouring. Putting expensive fruit and ingredients in the primary only means it will get torn up by the yeast and expelled through the airlock as aroma and your bang per dollar of ingredient goes out the airlock with it. Bulk aging helps as well. Thats why I'm racking to 5 litres as the smallest for bulk aging, I have 25 litre and 34 litre glass demijohns specifically set aside for bulk aging Mead once I really get going!
Cheers,
Brewer Pete
PS Forgot to add a picture of what that big ol' paint stirrer looks like I use to make Meads with in bulk. Shoves into my cordless drill for a very frothy foamy oxygenation session with my honey must.
You can buy a drill unit just for stirring, but after GMC went under locally, the prices of Tools at Bunnings has jumped through the roof lately.
