Jack Ratt Lyme Bay Black Cherry Mead, 75 cl

Product Information

Tip — make sure you never fasten the cap of your gallon jug to prevent potentially explosive carbon dioxide buildup! The Complete Guide to Making Mead: The Ingredients, Equipment, Processes, and Recipes for Crafting HoneyWine

Rinse the cherries and cut each one in half with a sanitized knife on a sanitized cutting board. Don’t remove the pits. Place the cherries in a nylon steeping bag, and set aside until Step 5.Yeast: A vital ingredient for fermentation, choose a suitable wine yeast, such as Lalvin D-47. This will convert the sugars into alcohol and CO2.

It can be made with different types of honey, depending on the flavor you want to achieve. You can also infuse your mead with fresh fruit, herbs, and spices (lavender-infused mead is pretty lovely) — so the possibilities are really up to you. All the Equipment You’ll Need Water: You’ll need sufficient water to reach your desired volume. Depending on the recipe, you can use tap water, spring water, or carbon-filtered water. Always ensure it’s clean and free from impurities. 12 cups for a 1-gallon batch should work fine. By omitting the boiling step, the color of the mead stays light, and delicate honey aromas aren’t boiled off. Not boiling also obviates the need to cool the entire volume of must. In dump-and-stir meads, contaminating microbial growth is rarely a problem. This is due to the low pH of the initial honey-and-water mixture, and also the presence of antimicrobial compounds in honey. Feed the Yeast

Make A Cherry Mead (A Melomel)

Not all of these materials will be needed initially; they will be used in later steps. I will specify which items won't be used right away which will give you time to get them if you do not already have them. If you do not have an item, I would recommend buying it, although some items are optional. If you have a local home brew store nearby, I would recommend supporting them and buying all the materials there. Otherwise buy online; one company that I trust is Northern Brewer. I have been buying from them for several years and they are always trustworthy. I will supply links for ease of access for those of you that do not have a local home brew store. This allows the water and the honey to mix together. If it doesn't seem like there is enough water in the carboy to mix the honey, then add a little bit more, but not too much. You'll need the water for later. This is not cleaning the equipment, it is sanitizing the equipment so no stray yeast or bacteria can contaminate the batch.

A great way to do this it simply to pop your mead in the fridge! Keep it in there for at least two days. The cold forces any leftover particles to fall to the bottom of your container.

Fermentation Time

In this recipe, you can choose exactly how sweet you'd like your wine to be. We'll go over it in further detail later, but we recommend using between two and three pounds of honey per gallon of mead — 2 pounds if you want it on the dryer side, and 3 pounds if you'd like it to be sweeter.