Spiced Mead

Well it might not be food, but it’s home made! Strangely the local supermarket had a load of jars of Honey at 49p a jar in January. It was apparently close to it’s ‘Best before date’! Honey by it’s very nature is one of the few food items which are not dried which will never go off. But their loss is our gain…..

Ingredients:-

4 x 400ml jars of runny Honey
1 Cinnamon Stick, snapped in half
2 Thumb sized lumps of Ginger, peeled
4 Cloves
1 Sachet of (Polish shop) Dry fast acting Yeast
Water
Liquid Finings sachet

Method:-

(1) Bung all the ingredients in a demijohn with enough water to allow a little head space.
(2) With your hand over the opening, give it all a good shake.
(3) Place a bung and air-trap in the neck.
(4) Make sure it doesn’t make a mess through the air-trap for the first week of fast fermentation. If so clean the outside for the demijohn.
(5) Pop in a cupboard and check the water level in the air-trap once in a while.
(6) Leave it alone until the air-trap stops bubbling.
(7) Decant using a pipe into another large bottle and sterilize the demijohn ( If you can’t get hold of proper tablets, Denture tablets work perfectly! )
(8) Rinse the demijohn well and then return the Mead.
(9) Add liquid finings ( You can buy these on-line for very little. )
(10) Allow to clear for 24 hours.
(11) Decant into seal-able bottles.
(12) At this stage it will be good. Give it a few months to mature and it will be better.

We tried a small tipple each before adding the finings. It’s very warming. I suspect as there is quite a sweetness that it has brewed out to 11 to 12 %, which is the best ( Or worst! ) you can expect from this sort of Yeast. It’ll be a treat tipple. Not for drinking by the pint, as we’re likely to loose days of our lives if we did!!!!!!!