You might have a local apiary too, sometimes small businesses aren’t really that visible online. You could look on Facebook but I found mine at our town’s annual street fair. You could try going to a nearby farmer’s market and see if anyone is selling honey there too.
if youve only been at it for a few months you havent tasted what youve made yet, really. you gotta let this stuff sit six months absolute minimum, but then its still not great. 1-2 years for it to taste right
A few years ago an old buddy of mine found a bottle of our first mead tucked away in the bottom of his closet. It had been there for at least 15 years. He tasted it but said it was not worth drinking. It was not particularly good to begin with though.
I’ve had batches just not do the secondary ferment and never get any good.
I made 25L of simple mead and bottled it in 250ml nottles as the wedding favor for our wedding guests, and the label said “best after” a certain date because it was too young to drink. We parlayed this into part of our ceremony about how good things improve with time, like relationships blah blah blah (it was actually quite nice)
The knowledge of how to make good mead has greatly matured in the last several years. With modern techniques there is no need for years of aging! The exception being if you purposely want micro oxidation characteristics.
Yeah, by several years I mean a decade now - how time flies! In the book “The Complete Guide To Making Mead” by Steve Piatz he describes “a predictable and repeatable meadmaking process that can produce drinkable meads after months of aging, rather than years”.
Such information is also available elsewhere online at sites like the meadmakr guide.
Like with other fermented beverages, some recipes will have potential to transform more with extended aging while others are better fresh.
Yo you don’t need any equipment to let it age- you just let it bottle age, put those bottles on the shelf and forget about them for a good long while. you wont believe how much better it gets over time.
The lower the APV the less time you need to wait.
What kind of yeast are you using? I had my best results using a champagne yeast, but I was always shooting for very high APV
Yeah, I made a small batch one year with excess comb/pollen/etc I had left over from a hive, and even after a few months it was, …interesting, but a tasted bad/wrong. I was moving house and discarded (!) the last couple of bottles.
5 years later I was visiting a friend and they’d found a bottle of it that I’d given to them, and it was just awsome… f’ing strong, but so smooth, and woah what depth of flavour.
The recipes I’m finding are all for a gallon or more at a time, do you think it’s worth doing a smaller test batch (like 1/2 gallon) or does it work better with the whole gallon?
The downside of brewing small batches of mead is that you might like it and depending on your brewing method it takes quite a lot to make. I made 5L at one point, took 6 months to clear in primary (I’m lazy, no secondary here) and it then… erm… evaporated in about 2 months. Then I started 10L batches. Thinking of just doing 20L now.
No worries - might have been a bit too short. Was intended to just shout our name for it. From what I know mead is the oldest form of alcohol going several thousand centuries back
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