Raspberry Mead – Micro Batch Recipe (2024)

FAQs

How many raspberries for a gallon of mead? ›

You'll need 3 pounds of honey and roughly 6 ounces of raspberries per gallon.

You'll know it's done when the bubbling has slowed down significantly (fermentation creates carbon dioxide, which causes bubbling in the airlock). The fermentation usually takes about 7 days, but your mead might bubble as long as two weeks!

The ratio of water to honey depends on the type of mead you want to make. For a dry mead, the ratio is 4 parts water to 1 part honey; a sweet mead is 2 to 1. Kluz likes his mead sweet, so he typically uses 1 3/4 gallons of honey and tops it off with 3 1/4 gallons of water.

I recommend 1-2 grams of nutrient per liter of must and 10 grams of yeast per 5-6 gallon batch.

A good starting point with most fruits is about 3 pounds of fruit per gallon of mead, though I have been known to use 5 or even 6 pounds of fruit. Fruit blends can produce some great-tasting meads.

Pour the fruit puree into the fermentation jar. Rack the mead from the carboy to the fermentation jar, taking care to leave as much lees as possible at the bottom of the carboy. Place the lid on the jar and refrigerate for 1 to 2 weeks.

Keep in mind that a one-gallon batch will almost always ferment faster than a five-gallon batch, but there are a few techniques for speeding up both. To put it simply, mead has a lot of sugars. These sugars need to fully ferment, releasing carbon dioxide while doing so, before they can be bottled.

Stirring twice a day is generally sufficient (if you have a fast fermentation, you might want to stir three or four times a day). Stirring does a couple of things: It blows off carbon dioxide, which lowers potential yeast stress, and it adds oxygen to your mead when the yeast can use it best.

If you're using less honey to make more of a beer-like mead, those can be fully fermented and drinkable in under a month. Other types can take a few months. It just depends on the amount of honey. Amount of honey primarily is what it depends on, and some yeasts ferment honey faster than others.

Back to your question: What happens if a winemaker adds too much yeast? Probably not much—there's only so much sugar in the grapes for the yeast to convert, and that limits how much work there is for yeast to do.

Why does no one drink mead anymore? ›

Why did it fall out of favor? There were some new tax laws, as well as an increased availability of West Indian sugar in the 17th century that made honey harder and less necessary to obtain. But it was also the rise of other alcohols—namely beer and wine—that really did it in.

If you put in a bunch of honey and you get enough yeast (the right kind of yeast where it ferments all the way out) then you'll have a really dry, high alcohol champagne-like mead. You can use less honey to make a lower alcohol mead.

Stuck fermentation: If the pitching rate is too low, the yeast may not be able to overcome the stress of the fermentation environment and may go dormant. This can result in a stuck fermentation, where the fermentation stops before all of the sugars have been converted.

Your mead will need a cool, dark place to ferment for the next 30 days. The ideal fermentation temperature range is between 65°-73°F.

Lalvin D-47

This white wine yeast is the primary choice for many mead makers. It ferments at a moderate to fast pace with little foaming and is good for medium to dry meads. It tends to accentuate the honey characteristics so it is a good choice for traditional varietal mead.

The first thing you need to do is add raspberries. to your vessel. Freezing your berries before can help add more flavor. Just make sure they are thought when you add them. After that, you're gonna add your honey.

About 30 pounds of berries are required for every 5-gallon batch of wine. Berries are very fruity and acidic, so water and sugar are added to the berry pulp prior to fermentation to reduce the acidity to about 0.8% and increase the sweetness.

If I am looking for what I might call a session mead then I will use about 1.5 lbs of honey dissolved to make 1 US gallon. One pound of honey in that volume has a specific gravity of 1.035 and 1.5 lbs will have a gravity of about 1.052.

A new planting in sandy loam soil requires 18 gallons per day per 100 feet of row. A mature planting in the same soil type requires 27 gallons per day per 100 feet of row. Increase the water rate for sandier soil, and decrease it for heavier soil.