It’s been a while since I’ve brewed a batch of mead, but this weekend I finally got back to it! Technically, I made a melomel, or maybe a hybrid. I should explain.
Mead is made with water, honey, and yeast. That’s it at its most basic. There are a variety of ways you can ugment the basic process, one of them being adding fruit or replacing the water with fruit juice. If you do the with apples/apple juice, you are making what is known as a cyser. Using any other type of fruit makes it a melomel.
One of my favorite ways to make mead is by replacing the water with pomegranate juice. This gives the final brew a nice, tart punch to offset the sweetness from the honey. Plus, it gives it a great dark reddish-purple color when it is finished that makes it look like some Middel-Earth elixer.
Some warm water is needed to dissolve the 3 pounds of honey ( I make one gallon batches) and the rest of the fermenting jug is filled with pomegranate juice, which is why I specified that it is probably a bit of a hybrid. The mead is burbling happily away right now as the Yeasty Boys do their magic and once that is done I’ll move it to another 0ne gallon jug, being careful to leave the dead yeast sludge behind.
Pretty quick and easy path to some homebrew goodness. I’ll update things along the way. I’m also about to start a mead that will incorporate cherry juice concentrate and a little bit of vanilla extract. I’ve has some tasty success with those flavors in the past and am looking forward to how that turns out.
The biggest struggle in making mead is leaving it alone once bottled so that it can age and bring out the perfect flavors. Thirst world problems, I suppose…
