Blackberry Mead

28th June 2012

Started the mead base. Will collect blackberrys when they ripen in a few weeks time.

• 1360 grams honey
• 25 raisins
• 2 teaspoons baking yeast (Alison's Easy Bake Yeast)
• 4ish liters of spring water

Lesson learned: It is better to work slowly, jar by jar rather than rush getting the honey into the demijohn as doing so made a bit of a mess.

29th June 2012

Fermenting with vigor. Audible fizz and the air lock is popping every few seconds.

29 July 2012

Waited for the blackberries to become ripe. The first of them now are so I took the chance to collect some and prepare them for the mead.

In this case I froze 236g of Blackberries and then placed them in a clean demijohn and racked the mead onto them. Stabilised the mead at the same time to prevent any infection from the blackberries and to start the clearing process.

Later on that evening I checked on the mead. It has started to take on the Blackberry colour and strangely a substance has collected around the blackberries that are floating at the top.

Giving the demijohn a slight shake it drops to the bottom so I suspect it is yeast from the mead that has attracted to the blackberries. Like some sort of fining effect.

07th August 2012

The berries have been in the mead now for 11 days now so I thought I would sample the flavour and take a gravity reading. It has really taken on a nice colour from the berries.

Final Gravity: 0.996

The blackberry flavour is very good, not too strong and not to subtle. Feels about right. The mead is strong, but thats not a bad thing and with some honey to sweeten I think will be just right.

I used a 50ml sample to determine how much sweetnes to add. At around 3g-4g it was just right. So scaling that up we have apx 360g for 4500ml which is about a small jar of honey. I figure the same level of sweetness can be applied to the orange mead.

So next task will be to rack of the berries and batch sweeten the mead.

14th August 2012

Racked the mead onto a total of 343g of blended honey which brought it up to the right sweetness. It is quite a lot of honey but it is required of offset the bitterness that i think the baking yeast has introduced.

20th August 2012

He mead has been clearing nicely now for a while and I decided to get the bottling started. There was a fair bit of Lees at the bottom of the demijohn which I didn't want hanging around too long either.

Bottling into a mix of 1L swing tops and some clear beer bottles. The mead is very clear and looks very tasty!

The bottling was a little tricky because the Lees were very easy to stir up. I feel like I need to create some sort of cap that holds the siphon tube in place so I can operate the other end with two hands (one to turn the value, the other to aim).

Still, the result is worth it.