Raspberry Mead – Micro Batch Recipe (2024)

FAQs

How much raspberries for 1 gallon of mead? ›

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

Fermentation: Keep fermentation temps up to around 70° or 75° F. Fermentation should last between 10 to 20 days. Rack into a conditioning vessel and bulk age for 3 to 6 months.

How Much Honey Should I Use? In this recipe, you can choose exactly how sweet you'd like your wine to be. We'll go over it in further detail later, but we recommend using between two and three pounds of honey per gallon of mead — 2 pounds if you want it on the dryer side, and 3 pounds if you'd like it to be sweeter.

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.

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. Using less honey might make it a little bit more dry, though not necessarily.

Crush the fruit with a blender. 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.

To make mead can be as simple as to add raw honey and water to a mason jar, cover it with cheesecloth (or cap it if you want to depend solely on the honey's yeast for fermentation) for a few days and let nature do its thing.

Traditional meads usually require six months to 2 years for the flavors to mellow and smooth and any off flavors to diminish. Melomels or fruit meads can take six months to 5 years for the flavors to fully integrate and the tannins and acids to mellow. Metheglin or spiced meads are quicker, six months to a year.

If you want to bottle your semi-sweet mead, which is about that two and a half to three pounds per gallon of water, it will take maybe a month or two to really ferment to the full amount of alcohol, but it's going to take another month or two to really fully ferment to where you can feel safe bottling it, because if ...

Is raw honey OK for mead? ›

What type of honey should I use? The key is to use raw or unpasteurized honey to get the best and most unique flavors for your mead. Commercially processed honey often found in the grocery stores is pasteurized and ultrafiltered.

Tannin- This will give you a counter point to the mead's sweetness. I use black tea for mine. 5 bags of any black tea will do. You're using the black tea for the tannins not the flavor of the tea.

Mead, unlike beer, benefits from degassing during fermentation. Honey, being largely composed of sugar, can ferment very rapidly in the first stages of fermentation and build up a significant amount of CO2 in the form of carbonic acid. This carbonic acid can slow fermentation.

Introduction: Strawberry Mead (1 Gallon)

This calls for the Strawberries to be added during primary fermentation. But most of the experts in blind tests have preferred meads with fruit (actually called Melomel's) added during secondary.

Freezing fruit first is often recommended because it breaks down the cells walls in fruit, allowing the yeast to more readily access the sugars, as well as killing off most critters. Most of the folks that I know who make mead add the fruit into the primary (a lot of the sugars will ferment in primary).

Average yield per plant is 1 to 2 quarts of raspberries.

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.