As I am sitting here at my desk typing to all of you, my apartment is filled with this sweet winey smell. That smell is coming from a six gallon plastic drum with a hole on top filled with water, honey, and yeast. Yes individuals, I am making the brew of the gods, I am making mead. Rumored to being the first fermented beverage made by man, it has fueled warriors of old, Egyptians, Greeks, Woad Warriors, Soldiers of Rome, Native Americans, and hundreds of other groups of people. This drink came from making honey water, just honey and water placed in a cask out in the open. Then bees came, and pollen, dropping wild yeasts into the container causing and irreversible event to take place: Fermentation.
Now before we continue, we must understand what fermentation is. Fermentation is the digestion of sugars, specifically simple sugars like glucose, into alcohol! This process in beer takes two to three weeks, in distilled products two weeks, in wine months, and in mead it all depends on the ingredients.
We are on the middle of week 2 of the fermentation process, and we nearly lost the batch last weekend because it stopped fermenting. For whatever reason, the yeast stopped eating the sugars in the honey, and just died. We put in rejuvenation powders, a product purchasable at any home brew store, and the fermentation took off twice as fast. This tells me that it should have gone in at the beginning of the fermentation process.
I feel as though we are coming to the end of the process because the smell from the drum has changed from a yeast, beer fermentationy type smell to a wine like odor, that tangy fermented smell that makes you go “ah, that’s wine.” And really that’s what mead is, a honey wine. Its not carbonated like beer, its not distilled like any hard liquor, it just ferments, and is drinkable after that. Simple, huh?
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