Dreaming, I find meadmaking to be part science and part art. And I'm a food scientist!
There are things that you do that I don't. Sanitizing for example, we just use hot soapy water and bottle brushes (doh! Those should be added to the necessary list!)
Our basic process is:
But the honey from a local source that doesn't pasteurize it. The store-bought honey is pasteurized and has lost a lot of the aromatic qualities of unpasteurized honey.
We usually add fruit from our yard, this can be wild grapes, blackberries, black raspberries, mulberries. Sometimes we go for spices instead, I recently made some chai mead with all the spices from chai in the first step, lovely!
Weigh the honey into the pot (our pot has measurement lines at every half gallon, very useful when you need to make for a specific carboy size). We shoot for about 18% sugars in the batch. This yields a sweet mead at about 16% alcohol.
Add other ingredients like fruits, tea, spices.
Add water up to the right line.
Heat to exactly 145 degrees F. Any hotter and the aromatics that you were so proud of will vanish!
Put on the lid and let it cool to body temp, that's usually the next morning.
Add the yeast, we usually use sweet wine yeast from a packet.
With the lid still on let it bubble in this pot for 7 days, scooping off the foam daily.
Once the foam is gone the mead can be transferred to the carboy using a flexible tube. This can be tricky because you don't want to get fruit pulp stuck in the tube or anything.
Put on the airlock and find a way to keep it warm for a few months! Some things we have done:
Put it right next to a heat register cover, wrapping a towel around the sides away from the register.
Put it on top of a table with a hole in it (like an expandable table), put a space heater under the table, trap the heat down there with a blanket and wrap up the carboy. Enough of the heat goes to the carboy to keep it warm.
If you want to be fancy (we haven't done this yet) make a cabinet with a lower and upper chamber. The lower is for an incandescent light bulb and the upper is for the carboy. Drill a few holes in the shelf so the heat can rise to the mead.
Anyways, sorry, I can get a bit carried away when speaking of mead! I started making this in 2002 I think, then got my brother and later my husband into it as well.