Quick mead ?

When you read posts from new mead makers around the forums, the question that often comes up, is which is the quickest mead to make ?

Given that young meads can often taste like piss, that's not the easiest question to answer, because while a young mead can indeed taste hideous, the transformations that are wrought by ageing are amazing.

Taste a young brew, finished fermenting, cleared and then racked to bulk age and you can get just "alcohol hot" with some vague indescribable "what's left after the sugars have gone" sort of thing. Yet bulk age for 6 months or more and if you're really lucky, it might come good that quickly, it may need longer to become good, but the 6 months will demonstrate the changes that are happening in the bulk ageing stage.

Bulk ageing is actually a home brewers compromise. It allows us to produce a batch where all of the bottles produced from that batch will taste the same i.e. consistent. It prevents different characteristics developing from differences in heat, humidity, etc, which might occur if the batch was bottled prior to ageing. Of course, it would seem that commercial wine producers can indeed, "bottle age" their wines, but equally that is because they have access to temperature and humidity controlled storage for consistency, which we home brewers don't have or can't afford, generally speaking.

So here's a link to Gotmead main sites list of (apparently) "quick" meads.

Now I can't really recommend them particularly as "quick" meads, because apart from the Joes Ancient Orange recipe, I haven't tried making any of them.

The "JAO" recipe is pretty quick for a mead, it takes IRO 3 months. Joe himself, states that it's drinkable once it's clear. Indeed it is, but if you age it for 3 to 6 months as well, IMO, it improves immeasurably.....

Oh, and JAO is best made as close to the original recipe as possible. Of course, there are some issues that crop up over and over again. Like the yeast. He suggests using the Fleischmanns bread yeast, which is fine, but not a bit of good to me as Fleischmanns is a US brand. But having tried the recipe with local equivalents like Allinsons, Hovis, and even both Tesco and Co-op own brand, they all work fine. So I'm thinking that as long as you keep your batch basically the same i.e. the honey to water ratio, "normal" bread yeast, the orange, raisins and spices, then you should get a decent brew that conforms to the criteria set down by Joe.

The rest of the recipes, you'll just have to try for yourself........

Bochet part 3......

Well, the bochet seems to have fermented ok. I was very lapse with it.The master plan was to use the stirrer and make it my first stir plate attempt, but for reasons I don't yet understand,  the fucking stirrer kept throwing the stir bar off the magnetic field. I even sent off for a longer bar to see if that would work but it didn't.  So I lost interest in it a bit and forgot to add nutrient and stuff like that.

Anyway,  it seems to have fermented ok and it's even cleared pretty much. I haven't tested it recently but when I did the other week it was at about 1.004 and now its racked out of the 5 litre erhlenmeyer flask into a DJ it still tasted a bit weird. Plus there was about a half litre of air space so I just topped it up with a sour mash whisky as it was to hand.

I'm not fussed how it's come out as I'm more interested in getting a working stir plate for some other traditional batches. I can focus on sorting out yeasts etc for now, as the D21 I did have had given up the ghost and wasnt starting at all.