Ancient Orange Mead - Tutorial in Pictures!

[Kevin]

Hi everyone,

I've recently made this mead and it's fermenting as we speak. As part of the process, I thought I would share some pictures and describe my method.

I must add that I am by no means an expert. In fact, this is my first ever mead! But it's easy enough so I urge you to give it a go. The recipe is a 'classic' and has been tried successfully by hundreds of people worldwide.

First, here's the recipe for a 1gal batch:

• 3 1/2 lbs Clover or your choice honey or blend (will finish sweet)
• 1 Large orange (later cut in eights or smaller rind and all)
• 1 small handful of raisins (25 if you count but more or less ok)
• 1 stick of cinnamon
• 1 whole clove ( or 2 if you like - these are potent critters)
• optional (a pinch of nutmeg and allspice.....very small )
• 1 teaspoon of Fleishmann’s bread yeast ( now don't get holy on me--- after all this is an ancient mead and that's all we had back then)
• Balance water to one gallon

I also added a crushed Vit B1 tablet to each batch to help with the yeast as it was going rather slowly!

Next, a quick pic of the equipment and ingredients:

And here's my method:

1. Sterilise ALL of your equipment thoroughly... I use WVP but there are plenty of other methods if you prefer.

2. Mix your honey with some warm/hot water and add this to the container. I emptied the honey out of the jars, then added hot water to half full and poured this in too to ensure I got all of the honey out. In all, it needed just under 3.75 of these Asda Smartprice honey.

3. Chop your orange and get your stick of cinnamon, clove and raisins ready.

(Bit of a pointless pic but I thought it looked arty!!)

[Kevin]

4. Add all of these to the container and top up with cold water to about 3 inches from the top; this is to allow for foaming of the yeast.

5. Once at room temperature, shake it up well to aerate and mix everything together take a SG reading for working out approx ABV etc. Bear in mind that this will go down a bit when you top it up with water but will go up as the sugar comes out of the fruits so this will only be approximate.

6. Finally, add the yeast to the mix and stir it in.

Voila! Now all you need to do is leave this in a warm dark place for approx 2 months and you will have a nice, tasty sweet mead (well, melomel actually but who cares?!) In a few days I will top up with water and leave it alone till the fruit drops!

UPDATE: After two days, although there was a nice foam on top, fermentation was quite slow so I added a crushed Vit B1 tablet and gave it a good shake. You can see, the raisins had rehydrated and everything is now floating:

I hope you find this useful!!!

Kevin

[wisp]

Cheers kevin. BTW, the pic you said looked arty could be incorporated into a label for the mead.

[fatbloke]

Well done Kevin, nice additional info, pic's etc.

So, a couple of points. You were worried about the ferment being slow ?

Well if you look at the numbers on your pic of the hydrometer, it's showing about 1100. That's not a problem but it's fair to point out that if you've stuck to the recipe religiously, you wouldn't expect it to take off like a rocket, as the nutrient is being supplied by the raisins and orange. So that takes a little while to start nourishing the yeast (honey is famously low in nutrient).

Presuming following the recipe, will give you a medium/sweet mead. I think that is what Joe Mattioli intended.

There's actually not a lot of point in experimenting with the recipe, as it just seems to change too much i.e. wine yeast ferments it dry and it's not that nice dry. Using a different citrus doesn't work well either (I've tried most of the possible permutations - the bog standard recipe seems to be the only one that comes out well "as is".

I take it that the plassy fermenter is a 5 litre one ? As it'd be normal to top it up after a couple of days to reduce the air space........

Either way, the single vit B1 tablet should (theoretically) just make it ferment a bit quicker.

If you like the idea of making meads, it's worth the effort of googling for gotmead (main site and forums). Although it's biased toward US meadmakers, there's a hell of a lot of valuable info. Stuff like slight modification of their recipes seems to work fine allowing for the slight differences in available ingredients ( tronozymol instead of fermaidk and goferm etc). Though it can be a bit of a wind up to read of a vastly better available list of honeys that they have, but with additional effort/searching etc, you can usually track down same or similar ones.

Oh, and the only possible improvement I found to Joes original recipe would be to peel the zest off the orange with as little pith as possible, then remove the pith, seperate the segments and gently remove the skins from the segments (and any pips). Then just add the zest and flesh instead of the 1/8ths of the whole orange.

The idea of that is, some people aren't keen on the slightly "marmalade" hint that the pith can sometimes impart. So preping the orange as above should give a cleaner orangey hint.

regards

Jtfb

[lockwood1956]

Originally Posted by fatbloke

Oh, and the only possible improvement I found to Joes original recipe would be to peel the zest off the orange with as little pith as possible, then remove the pith, seperate the segments and gently remove the skins from the segments (and any pips). Then just add the zest and flesh instead of the 1/8ths of the whole orange.

The idea of that is, some people aren't keen on the slightly "marmalade" hint that the pith can sometimes impart. So preping the orange as above should give a cleaner orangey hint.

thats a great tip John

[fatbloke]

Originally Posted by lockwood1956

thats a great tip John

There's "god alone knows" how many people have made Joes recipe over at Gotmead Bob. There's a number of them who don't seem to like "proper" English Marmalade.

Dunno what you reckon Bob, but I think that Joe actually produced a very cunning recipe. To use bread yeast so it reduces the alcohol content and gives a sweet mead with the residual sugar, while counteracting the sweetness with a hint of bitterness from the pith, at the same time, with the orange and honey sweetness, the addition of the spices to enhance it.

Very cleverly thought about recipe that one.

The fact that it's a good starter recipe by the nature of the "chuck it in a DJ" approach and giving pretty good, consistent results is a bonus. It's certainly not a "hit and miss" thing, well I don't think so.

Ah, and if someone did want to zest and flesh an orange like that, it may turn out that they'd needed two oranges rather than one - as I'd suspect it'd need extra acid to help with the sweetness. Ha! now that's one permutation that I haven't tried (only got varietal honey available right now so it'll have to wait until there's an offer on at coop, asda or tesco's).

Next batch.....

regards

jtfb