Brewing and Fermentation

[Speaker to Animals]

Just follow the yellow brick road and watch out for the thot witches when you touch down.

Thems are premium grits out in Rutherford county.

No thots out there. Not enough traffic; no attention.

[Fife]

Just be mindful of the witches, it is a college town you know.

[Montegriffo]

As far as equipment, you can get a fermentation kit for about $50. Just get one for making wine, since mead is essentially a "honey wine".

Equipment can start building up from there. You probably will eventually want larger carboys to move to 5 gallon batches. For aging, you might want to get oak barrels.

Are you using a wine or a beer yeast?
What % alcohol are you aiming for?
My brewing experience is mostly in beer but my dad was a prolific hedgerow wine maker.
It has been a while but from memory 4.4lbs of sugar made 40 pints of ale at around 6 or 7%.
Honey may make stronger ale per lb though.
If you want anything stronger than that you need a wine yeast. The yeast which gets the highest strength is champagne yeast which can go up to a maximum of 17% before the alcohol kills it.

[Speaker to Animals]

As far as equipment, you can get a fermentation kit for about $50. Just get one for making wine, since mead is essentially a "honey wine".

Equipment can start building up from there. You probably will eventually want larger carboys to move to 5 gallon batches. For aging, you might want to get oak barrels.

Are you using a wine or a beer yeast?
What % alcohol are you aiming for?
My brewing experience is mostly in beer but my dad was a prolific hedgerow wine maker.
It has been a while but from memory 4.4lbs of sugar made 40 pints of ale at around 6 or 7%.
Honey may make stronger ale per lb though.
If you want anything stronger than that you need a wine yeast. The yeast which gets the highest strength is champagne yeast which can go up to a maximum of 17% before the alcohol kills it.

Most meaderies, if they purchase yeast, I think use wine yeast (which is what I did), but I want to get to the point where I maintain my own local yeast culture.

You can make mead strong as fuck if you want to. Most of the stuff you buy is comparable to wine because most of America still has that state liquor thing going on.

It's the same with ales. They usually cap out around here (commercially) at around 7-8%, I think, because going too high means it gets license as liquor and then you have to go through state distribution. This is one of those areas where I would fall squarely inline with Fife in burning it all down.

[Speaker to Animals]

The honey used was two kinds. The main batch of honey was from a local distributor here in the mountains. It wasn't pure sourwood, but tastes almost like a mix of sourwood and clover honey. The second batch was blueberry honey.

I think the best results would use something like sourwood, but I don't want to waste sourwood honey on initial experiments. Seems almost criminal.

Although most of you probably don't know what that is since we don't typically export it from the mountains. It mostly gets consumed locally. Best honey you can find in America.

[Zlaxer]

[brewster]

Is this on topic? Was in Kentucky last week, heard the sirens of the trucks responding to the Beam rickhouse fire. Now I've toured a Scotch distillery (Dalwhinnie) and 2 Bourbon. Makin booze is still on my bucket list. Damn that stuff is cheap in KY!!!

[Montegriffo]

As far as equipment, you can get a fermentation kit for about $50. Just get one for making wine, since mead is essentially a "honey wine".

Equipment can start building up from there. You probably will eventually want larger carboys to move to 5 gallon batches. For aging, you might want to get oak barrels.

Are you using a wine or a beer yeast?
What % alcohol are you aiming for?
My brewing experience is mostly in beer but my dad was a prolific hedgerow wine maker.
It has been a while but from memory 4.4lbs of sugar made 40 pints of ale at around 6 or 7%.
Honey may make stronger ale per lb though.
If you want anything stronger than that you need a wine yeast. The yeast which gets the highest strength is champagne yeast which can go up to a maximum of 17% before the alcohol kills it.

Most meaderies, if they purchase yeast, I think use wine yeast (which is what I did), but I want to get to the point where I maintain my own local yeast culture.

You can make mead strong as fuck if you want to. Most of the stuff you buy is comparable to wine because most of America still has that state liquor thing going on.

It's the same with ales. They usually cap out around here (commercially) at around 7-8%, I think, because going too high means it gets license as liquor and then you have to go through state distribution. This is one of those areas where I would fall squarely inline with Fife in burning it all down.

I think mead was brewed more as an ale in medieval Britain.
In pre-sugar times it was added to the malt to increase the strength of your ale and would get the short fermentation of a beer rather than the months needed for wine.
The rich drank imported wines and brandy.

You can make as much beer or wine as you want without interference from HM's govt so long as you don't sell it.
Distilling alcohol is strictly forbidden without the correct licenses.
If you are thinking of making it to sell then you are going to have to pass minimum hygiene standards especially at the bottling stage (the tedious part of home brewing).
I used to use beer bottles with sprung stoppers so I had to take all the rubber seals off before boiling them up to sterilize them.

Even if you buy brand new bottles you still have to sterilize them unless you want to get into vinegar making.

As a cash crop, organic artisan mead wine balsamic vinegar would be worth a fortune to the right chef.
I've used reduced balsamic vinegar costing £25 for a 1/4 Ltr bottle. That's over $500 dollars a gallon.

You could flog it to all the hipster wholefood shops in your area.

[Montegriffo]

Is this on topic? Was in Kentucky last week, heard the sirens of the trucks responding to the Beam rickhouse fire. Now I've toured a Scotch distillery (Dalwhinnie) and 2 Bourbon. Makin booze is still on my bucket list. Damn that stuff is cheap in KY!!!

I'm not a whisky drinker but I have toured the port caves in Oporto (Portugal) a couple of times and I wouldn't rule out doing it again.
The smell, as you walk through cellars full of port aging in oak barrels, is awesome.
I've just opened a bottle of Villa Nova late bottled vintage and am enjoying a tipple and a smoke after a hard day's cabinet making.

[brewster]

I'm not a whisky drinker but I have toured the port caves in Oporto (Portugal) a couple of times and I wouldn't rule out doing it again.
The smell, as you walk through cellars full of port aging in oak barrels, is awesome.

The smell of the barrel warehouses was amazing! I wouldn't be surprised if that port was in bourbon barrels. One of the oddities of US booze law is they require bourbon to be made in virgin oak barrels, so they get used once and sold off to other markets. I think some wineries scrape and re-char them, others consider the taste added value. I know Dalwhinnie used port barrels for some of their whiskey.