Mead Brewing
Fermenting honey to make wine
In fall 2019, since I was turning 21, I decided to experiment with making my own wine. This is something my grandfather had done for a while, but he makes proper red wine, and I was just going to attempt a far simpler kind of wine; Mead. Mead is a wine made from honey, and is perhaps the easiest fermented beverage to make. I found some rough numbers online, and settled on how much honey and how much water to use for my mead. After that I just mixed in some yeast and nutrients, and let it sit. Once the alcohol content got up around 14%, the yeast mostly died and settled to the bottom (this took about 1 month), so at that point I "racked" it, which just means I transfered it to another container and got rid of all the dead yeast sediment. After this, I added a small amount of bentonite clay to force any suspended solids to flocculate and settle, clarifying the mead.
After a few more months, I racked the mead again to seperate out the bentonite and all the sediment it removed. At this point the mead was much clearer and the cloudyness had almost completely gone away. At this point I just let the wine age in the bottle for a while.
To be honest, I didn't like the flavor very much. Once all the sugar in the honey was converted to alcohol, there wasn't really any honey flavor left, and it just tasted pretty bland. So I never really drank very much of it at all, and instead my mother took to using it as a cooking wine. I hear it did well with chicken.