Making It: Radical Home Ec for a Post-Consumer World (31 page)

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Making Mead

PREPARATION:
1 hour

WAITING:
1 year

The gathering of honey long predates the cultivation of wheat and grapes, and honey sometimes ferments on its own, even in the comb. Once
HOMO SAPIENS
discovered funny honey, it couldn’t have been long before we figured out how to ferment it on purpose. Thus was born the first happy hour.

Mead is made of honey, water, and yeast. Sometimes it’s carbonated, sometimes fruits or spices are added to it, but the most important determining factor for flavor is the yeast. Of course, the honey is important, too, as its flavor nuances will influence the mead, but the yeast is the major player. Colonize the same type of honey with two different yeasts, and you end up with two entirely different meads. Depending on the yeast, mead can run from sweet to dry and from mild to strong. We’ve made mead that tastes like cheap Chablis, and we’ve made mead that is honey-flavored rocket fuel.

The recipe calls for some specialized ingredients and equipment, all of which can be found in a brewer’s supply shop. Some of it can be used to brew beer, too, which is the next project. Honey mead is the easiest alcoholic beverage to make, a good entrée into the world of homemade hooch. All you have to do is stir up honey, water, and yeast—and wait.

YOU’LL NEED

• 3 pints filtered or bottled water
  
• 2 pounds honey
  
• 1 teaspoon yeast nutrient (such as Fermax)
  
• Ice cubes, enough to chill a sink (or a bin) full of water
  
• 4 pints filtered or bottled water, chilled in the refrigerator
  
• 1 packet wine yeast (such as Lalvin 71B-1122)
  
• Couple of spoonfuls of cheap vodka
  
• 5 teaspoons honey (for carbonation; optional)
  

EQUIPMENT:

• Food-grade plastic bucket
  
• Iodine-based sanitizer (such as iodophor)
  
• 6-8 quart stockpot
  
• Kitchen thermometer
  
• 2 (1-gallon) glass bottles, such as a cider jugs
  
• Funnel (any size)
  
• Fermentation lock and stopper to fit one of the jugs
  
• Auto siphon
  
• Swing-top capped bottles or ordinary beer bottles, a set of caps, and an inexpensive bottle capper
  

PUTTING IT TOGETHER

STEP 1: SANITIZE YOUR EQUIPMENT

You’re not working in a lab here, but a few precautions will keep you from making honey vinegar instead of honey wine. The easiest thing to do is to fill a food-grade plastic bucket full of water mixed with an iodine-based sanitizer. Refer to the sanitizer label for the dilution amounts. Submerge any utensils that will touch the mead in the sanitizer solution for a minute or so before using. There’s no need to rinse. You can sanitize the jugs by simply swishing around a bit of sanitizer solution inside them—you don’t need to fill them completely.

STEP 2: PREPARE AND PASTEURIZE THE “MUST”

Bring 3 pints of water to a boil in the stockpot and boil for 5 minutes. Turn off the heat. Add the honey to the water in the stockpot. Scoop up some of the boiling water and swirl it around in the honey jars to dissolve the leftover honey and add that to the pot, too. Stir well.

Add the yeast nutrient and stir again. Honey is low in nitrogen, which yeasts need to thrive. The yeast nutrient adds nitrogen to make fermentation go faster.

Check the temperature. The goal is to hold the “must” (the honey and yeast mixture) just above 150°F for 10 minutes to pasteurize it. If you need to bring the temperature up a little, turn the stove back on and stir over low heat. Watch the temperature carefully. Never boil the must, as this will degrade the flavor of the honey.

During the pasteurization period, take a moment to fill your kitchen sink or a big tub with ice.

When the 10-minute pasteurization period is over, it’s time to bring the temperature down. You want the cooling period as short as possible to minimize the chance that wild yeasts and bacteria will get into the must. Add the 4 pints of reserved, chilled water to the must and stir to combine. Next, speed cooling further by putting the pot in the ice-filled sink or bin.

While the must is cooling, mix half the package of wine yeast in 2 tablespoons of 100°F water in a sanitized bowl. Let it sit for 15 minutes.

Once the temperature of the must falls beneath 80°F, transfer it to a sanitized jug using a funnel.

STEP 3: PITCHING THE YEAST AND FIRST FERMENTATION

Now that the must is in the jug, you’re ready to add the wine yeast. This is called “pitching the yeast.” Lalvin 71B-1122 is a wine yeast that comes in a pouch and looks just like bread yeast. The kind of yeast you use will affect the flavor of the mead. If the yeast is too dry, the flavor of the honey is lost and mead tastes like a boring white wine. If the yeast is too sweet, the mead will be cloying. We like the Lalvin 71B-1122 because it splits the difference between sweet and dry. Using the funnel, pour the bowl of water mixed with yeast into the jug.

Fit the opening of the jug with a stopper and a fermentation lock. A fermentation lock is a small, inexpensive device that lets carbon dioxide out of the jug but doesn’t let air in. Fill the reservoir of the fermentation lock with cheap vodka instead of water. That way, if some of it spills into the bottle, you won’t contaminate your mead. Put the jug in a cool, dark place. An ambient temperature of 60° to 75°F is ideal for fermentation. The mead will start to bubble vigorously in a day or two. Eventually, the bubbling will subside and debris will settle to the bottom. This will take about a month. This process is called the first fermentation.

STEP 4: RACKING

After a month, liberate your mead from the debris that has settled to the bottom of the jug. The process of siphoning the liquid from one vessel to another, leaving debris behind, is called racking. The easiest way to rack the mead is with an auto siphon. To start siphoning, position the jug to be filled lower than the one holding the mead. For example, the mead can sit on the counter and the empty jug in the sink. Put the plunger of the auto siphon in the mead and the hose end in the empty bottle. Raise the plunger on the auto siphon and bring it back down slowly. The mead will start to flow into the empty bottle. The second jug will soon fill with clean mead.

Transfer the stopper and fermentation lock to the new bottle.

Transferring the mead to the second jug often starts the fermentation process going again, so you’ll probably notice a little more bubbling activity in the first days after the transfer. When the mead is quiet for at least 2 weeks and the liquid has cleared, you’re ready to bottle the mead.

STEP 5: CARBONATING THE MEAD (OPTIONAL)

If you wish to carbonate the mead, do it just before you bottle. Simmer the 5 teaspoons honey in ½ cup water, stirring to dissolve. Let cool and then stir into the jug of mead.

This small amount of sugar will reawaken the yeast and cause another fermentation to take place in the closed confines of the bottle, thus creating carbonation. Be careful not to add too much honey—this might lead to exploding bottles.

STEP 6: BOTTLING THE MEAD

We bottle mead with the same equipment we use for beer: used beer bottles, new bottle caps, and a bottle capper. You can also use bottles with resealable stoppers, like Grolsch bottles. Wine bottles could be used as well, but a wine bottle corker is more expensive than a bottle capper, and less mead is lost in testing from smaller bottles.

Before bottling, scrub the bottles with a bottle brush, then soak them in a big bucket filled with the iodine solution, or run them through the dishwasher, without soap, on a sanitizing setting. Then fill the bottles with the mead and cap them.

How long it takes for the mead to finish varies. Like wine, mead gets better over time. It takes a minimum of 6 to 8 months for something drinkable to ferment. Test it at that point. If it tastes like cleaning fluid, don’t despair. Let the rest of the bottles sit for a few months longer. It should be better at about 1 year in, but it may take several years for your mead to reach peak flavor. Reserve a few bottles from every batch for long-term testing. Take good notes. Like making wine, making mead is an art, and the flavors of each batch unfold over time.

STORAGE SAFETY

For safety reasons, and to preserve your furnishings from flying mead, store carbonating bottles somewhere bombproof, such as in a lidded plastic tub or in the basement or garage.

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Making Home Brew

Don’t let the equipment list and the length of the instructions here fool you. If you can make soup, you can make beer. Darn good beer. And the equipment is not that expensive, especially if you build some of it yourself.

We’d like to see home brewing liberated from the hands of obsessive middle-aged men. (If you visit the typical brewer’s supply shop, you’ll see what we mean.) It’s been all but forgotten that beer making was part of a housewife’s domain for centuries. What we mean to say is that brewing beer isn’t a gender-specific activity, but it is an important activity, so
someone
has to be the brewmeister in your house. Sharing home brew with your friends and family is one of the best parts of
DIY
living.

Let’s begin with a quick overview of how beer is made. First, grain is allowed to sprout slightly—this is called malting—and then it’s roasted. The roasted malt is soaked in hot water and drained slowly, a process that extracts the fermentable sugars from the grain. This sugary water, called the wort, is boiled with hops, cooled down, spiked with yeast, and allowed to ferment. In the fermentation process, the yeast converts the sugars to alcohol. Once the fermentation is complete, a little bit of sugar is added and the beer is bottled. This second sugar boost gets the yeast going again and causes a second fermentation to take place in the bottle, thus carbonating the beer.

There are two ways to make beer at home. The simplest way is to use ready-made malt extract, which comes in the form of a syrup or dehydrated powder. Malt extract is a concentrated form of the malty sugars extracted from the grain. All you do is mix malt extract with water and hops and boil, cool it down, and then add yeast. You can make great beers with extracts and do it on a regular kitchen stove. Some home brewers only use extract, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

But we like to take it a step back and extract our own wort in a process called all-grain brewing. You need a few extra items of equipment to do this, and it takes a little more time, but the advantage is that you have more control over the types of grain you use and so more options for brewing. It also gives you bragging rights.

Most beer recipes are delivered in a format similar to the one on page
221
, which might be a little confusing at first glance. They assume you know how to make beer already and that you just need a list of ingredients and some notes on timing. To teach you how to read a standard beer recipe, we’re notating this recipe to make it a little more transparent, then we’ll break down the process step by step in the instructions. You can find the ingredients in this recipe in any brewer’s supply shop.

Brewer’s Vocabulary

GRIST:
Ground malt.

HOPS:
The hop plant (
Humulus lupulus
) is an attractive flowering vine. Its fragrant, cone-shaped flowers are called hops. Hops are a bitter herb that gives beer its distinctive flavor. Different varieties of hops add specific characteristics to the flavor profile of the beer. Hops are divided into two basic categories: bittering hops and flavoring hops. Some types of hops serve both purposes.

MALT:
Malt is grain (usually wheat or barley) that has been sprouted (“malted”) and roasted for brewing. Malt is crushed before mashing and brewing. After it’s crushed, it is called grist.

MASH:
Mash is the combination of hot water and grist (ground malt). Grist is steeped in water (“mashed”) to release its sugars. The product of mashing is wort.

MASH TUN:
A lidded, insulated container in which the grist and water are mixed and soaked off heat. We use a converted 10-gallon drink cooler.

WORT:
The malt sugar solution that is drained from the mash tun and boiled with the hops, the precursor to beer.

Makin’ It California Pale Ale

PREPARATION:
5 hours

WAITING:
6 weeks

Beer recipes are strange beasts, written in obscure beer-geek shorthand which can only be intended to scare off the uninitiated. Instead of breaking our recipe down into a more readable form, we’ve presented it as you would likely find it if you came across it in a typical brewing book, but we’ve footnoted it to unlock the code. Once you understand the code, you’ll be able to crack any beer recipe you come across. Don’t worry if you don’t understand the recipe at first, the instructions following the recipe will make all clear.

MALT

• 8 pounds American two-row pale malt
  
• ½ pound American crystal malt 60L
  ¹
  
• ½pound American crystal malt 20L
  
• ½pound Munich malt 10L
  
• ½pound Victory malt
  

HOPS SCHEDULE
²

• 60 mins 3/4 ounce Columbus hops (also called Tomahawk)
  
• 30 mins ½ ounce Cascade hops
  
• 15 mins ½ ounce Cascade hops
  
• Dry hop ½ ounce whole Cascade hops for 2 weeks in secondary fermenter
  ³
  

YEAST

California Ale White Labs
WLP009
⁴

GRAVITY

Original gravity: 1.053 - Final gravity: 1.013
⁵

1
L notations after malt ingredients refer to a Lovibond measuring unit and denote the darkness of the grain after roasting. Grain is sold labeled like this.

2
The hops schedule tells you not only what type of hops you have to buy, but when to add them to the beer. For example, “60 mins” denotes the portion added 60 minutes before the brew period ends, and “15 mins” refers to the portion added 15 minutes before the brew period ends.

3
Hops are sold in several different forms, including pellets, plugs, and whole hops. In this case, you need ½ ounce of whole dried Cascade hops. If the hop is not designated as whole, you can use hops in any form you can get them in. Your shopping list from this recipe should read:
³
A ounce of Columbus hops total, 1 ½ ounces total of Cascade hops, at least ½ ounce of which must be whole.

4
This is a specific brand and type of yeast, one that should be easy to find. All brew shops sell a wide variety of yeasts. If they don’t carry this yeast, they can recommend a close substitute.

5
Original gravity is a measurement of the concentration of sugars in the wort; final gravity indicates the alcohol content of the beer. These measurements are taken with a simple device called a hydrometer. You don’t need to own a hydrometer, but testing helps you make sure that your recipe is on track. Think of these numbers as a quality assurance device.

YOU’LL NEED

EQUIPMENT AND MATERIALS TO MAKE, SCAVENGE, OR BUY:

• 8½ gallons filtered or bottled water
  
• 24-quart and 32-quart aluminum pots (You don’t need expensive stainless steel for beer making.)
  
• Outdoor burner and propane tank (Find one in a restaurant supply store or a big Asian market.)
  
• Oven mitts
  
• Mash tun (project 62)
  
• 2-quart pitcher
  
• Wire mesh skimmer/strainer with a handle
  
• Wort chiller (project 63)
  
• Couple of spoonfuls of cheap vodka
  
• 45-50 used beer bottles, or new bottles from a brew shop
  

EQUIPMENT AND MATERIALS YOU’LL FIND IN A HOME BREW SHOP:

• Iodine-based sanitizer (such as iodophor)
  
• Thermometer
  
• 6-gallon food-grade bucket with a lid (The lid should have a hole for a fermentation lock.)
  
• Fermentation lock and matching stopper
  
• 5-gallon glass carboy (jug)
  
• Auto siphon
  
• 2/3 cup corn sugar (for carbonation)
  
• Bottling wand with spring/pressure-flow tip
  
• Bottle capper
  
• 50 bottle caps (approximately)
  

PUTTING IT TOGETHER

BEFORE YOU START

At the home brew shop, pick up your malted grains, hops, yeast, and corn sugar. Malted grains are sold whole. At the store, you’ll weigh out all the malted grains you need and then put them through a grinder, which will roughly crack them. It’s fine to grind them together, all at once, and bring home the grain combined in one bag. It’s best to brew the beer within a few days of grinding.

Brewing yeast comes in may different forms. The yeast we recommend comes as a liquid. If you use a different kind of yeast, follow the directions on the label.

WHEN YOU’RE READY TO BREW

Remove the yeast from the refrigerator so that it can come to room temperature. Clean and set up your equipment. Sanitize the plastic fermenting bucket, stopper, funnel, fermentation lock, and anything else that will come into contact with the cooled wort. The easiest way to do this is to fill a big bucket with water and add iodine-based sanitizing solution, like iodophor, to the water. Follow dilution instructions on the bottle. Submerge all of the equipment to be sanitized in the water for 1 minute. Don’t rinse afterward. You don’t need to sanitize the brew pots or the mash tun, since they will be holding hot liquids, but they should be clean.

Gather some friends. Beer making is a long process but doesn’t take a lot of attention. It’s a great thing to do on a nice day while hanging out on the back porch and maybe grilling some food. Friends can help you lift the heavy pots and are generally enthusiastic about sampling and rating previous batches of brew.

MAKING THE MASH

1.
Heat 5 gallons of water to 160°F in the 24-quart pot. It’s hard to heat that much water on a stovetop. This is why you need the propane burner. That and the fact it’s better to make this mess outside.

2.
Preheat your mash tun by tossing ½ to 1 gallon of the heated water into the barrel and swishing it around. Return this water to the 24-quart pot to quickly reheat it to 160°F.

3.
Pour all the cracked grain (grist) into the mash tun. Slowly stir in the 5 gallons of 160°F water. Add the water bit by bit and stir to make sure the grain is moistened evenly. Never throw grain into a pot of water—always add water to the grain. This grain-and-water mixture is called the mash.