I personally kept going until all the cherries were crushed, which took sometime. The more crushed the cherries are, the more juice you'll get from them. The more cherry juice, the more cherry flavor your mead will have. Pour a small amount of mead into a glass and swill around the glass, where you should notice that it leaves behind a coating on the side of the glass. After a few weeks, you'll have a deliciously alcoholic (usually 10% to 12% ABV) honey wine on your hands! Skim off any foam that rises. These are impurities. The real purpose of this isn't to sanitize the honey and water. It is to get a nice homogenous mix of honey and water, draw out the flavors of the honey and of the cherries.

Tip — make sure you never fasten the cap of your gallon jug to prevent potentially explosive carbon dioxide buildup! Archaeological evidence puts mead as being one of the oldest alcoholic drinks in the world after traces of the honey-based drink were found in China over 9,000 years ago. This means mead has been enjoyed by some of history’s ancient civilisations, from the ancient Greeks to Norse marauders. You’ll probably have a bit left in the original honey jar, just add some warm water to the jar, shake it up, and pour that into the fermentation jug. Add a little more warm water to the fermentation jug until you have about the same amount of water and honey.When in doubt, taste-test your mead for sweetness, and then go onto the next step when your mead tastes dry enough for your liking. If it still tastes too sweet, let it keep fermenting for several more days until it tastes more dry. Pour saucy liquid from your pot onto the strainer and funnel to transfer the liquid into the gallon fermentation container. On her return flight to the hive, invertase, an enzyme in her proventriculus, begins breaking the sucrose down into its two component sugars, glucose and fructose. Some of the glucose is further degraded by the enzyme glucose oxidase into gluconic acid and hydrogen peroxide. At this point, the mixture contains up to 70 percent water. Don’t forget to include yeast nutrients, such as Fermaid K or diammonium phosphate, as they determine the fermentation’s overall health. Follow the recommended volume as specified by the manufacturer.

Pull the leaver on the siphon and you will be able to fill your bottle. Repeat this step until all the bottles are filled or your mead is at the bottom of the jar. The fermentation usually takes about 7 days, but your mead might bubble as long as two weeks! That’s totally fine — the longer your mead ferments, the more sugar your yeast are eating — and the dryer and more alcoholic your mead will become. Once all the bottles are filled, cap them with sanitized caps or corks, ensuring a secure and airtight seal. This helps prevent any unwanted contaminants or oxidization that may affect the mead’s flavor and quality. Is there a specific type of glass that you should drink mead from? Well, the suggestion is often to enjoy cold mead from a clear, stemmed wine glass (one for white wine or port) and hot mead in a whisky glass. However, if you want to channel your inner Viking and drain your mead from a drinking horn, we won’t stop you! What Is the Suggested Serving of Mead?

Want to use some other kind of fruit? Simple! Just use a pound of your fruit of choice. If you use some kind of a citrus fruit then don't add the orange juice! This is a semisweet melomel, or fruit mead, flavored with cherries, that finishes around 12 percent alcohol by volume (ABV). It’s a great mead for beginning mead-makers, because the added fruit avoids many of the problems associated with making mead from only honey. After the cherries have been crushed, ladle the cherry remains out of the juice and place it in the trash.

I like to chop the cherries (in a food processor) or mash them (with a potato masher), and let them sit in the honey for a couple hours before starting on the wine making. Age your mead. The character of your mead will change significantly as it ages. This is especially important with mead! Often referred to as the “Nectar of the Gods”, the golden drink has enjoyed a resurgence in recent years, with the demand from people eager to buy mead reaching new heights, which has certainly kept us busy! We have been perfecting our fantastic meads for over 15 years now, and often experiment with new and bold flavours to push the boundaries of what is possible with mead. After about six weeks (three if you’re making the half recipe), your mead is ready to siphon and bottle. You want to try and leave as much of the sediment behind, so you can either pour it very carefully into another container, or use a piece of tubing (like aquarium hose) to siphon it. Here, we have looked at how to enjoy mead, from serving size suggestions to drinking temperature, and even the glassware you are best to enjoy it from! What is Mead?

After your cherry mead has completed its fermentation process, it’s time to move onto the capping and bottling phase. This step is crucial in the mead-making process and requires attention to detail to ensure success. This recipe is not a lot of work but it will take you two days. On the first day you mix it up and on the second day you pitch the yeast into it.

Wait 7 days, then taste-test. After 7 days, take a very small sip of your mead. Right now, the yeast haven’t been separated from your mead, so it won’t taste amazing just yet. The alcohol by volume (ABV) of your cherry mead can vary depending on the fermentation conditions and the yeast strain used. To optimize the ABV and ensure a consistent alcohol content in your mead recipes, consider the following tips: Mead is wine made out of honey and water. If you can imagine the floral hints of honey without all the sweetness — that's a bit what mead tastes like. But it can be as sweet or as dry as you'd like! We recommend having a glass now, and saving a few bottles for later (this recipe will yield 4 750mL regular-sized wine bottles). You can compare the taste of younger and aged meads, and see which one you like better!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 Leave it loosely capped for about 20-30 minutes and you should see signs of life from the yeast – it should start foaming and bubbling.