Owl Hill Meadery, a subsidiary of Batmen Brewing

OK, so more like a 3 gallon carboy and some beer brewing equipment in my basement. But it makes some really good stuff! The name came from Judith’s suggestion of a name for our house. We live on a hill, and we have lots of owls, so it seemed logical enough. Sounded kinda medieval, too.

So, I got a little adventurous one winters day a few years ago, and tried a bottle of mead. For those of you who are not familiar with the stuff, it’s wine made from honey. It’s also the oldest known alcoholic drink, and the main fuel of berserkers in the days of the Vikings. 

I liked it! It was thicker than wine, sweet, and fairly strong to very strong. A good after dinner cordial, or winter warmer. It can be mulled with spices and served hot, or fermented with the spices in it already (Called “Metheglin”), or made with part fruit juice (“Melomel”) or malt (“Braggot”). It can also be made still or sparkling. Lots of room to be creative. 

I’m partial to plain, still mead, myself. 

Looked easy to make, so I figured I’d try it. I bought a 3 gallon carboy, with the rationalization that I could use it for short batches of beer when it was empty. Like I need to rationalize these things………. 

I bought 9 pounds of primo clover honey, acid blend, yeast nutrient, and a smack pack of liquid mead yeast (Wyeast sweet mead), and away I went! It fermented very slowly for the first few months, but it tasted pretty good after 4 months. I racked it, and let it sit another 3 months, until it had stopped fermenting. At this point, I racked it again, and added sparkolloid to clear the mead in preparation for bottling. This spurred another month of fermentation. Ugh! 

I finally did bottle it, but it had acquired an earthy funk that was slow to go away. I asked the local mead guru, and he said it would improve, but might take a year or more to do so. After 6 months, it tasted decent enough to drink, and continues to improve as it ages. As of this writing (November ’06), it’s now aged into a very fine still sweet mead that’s better than most commercial ones I’ve tried. I brought some to a mead tasting at a local homebrew shop, and it got very good reviews from several certified judges & home meadmakers. 

I did another batch in 2005. I was told that Lalvin K1V-1116 Montpelier makes good mead, and is very aggressive & quick to finish, even with honey (Which doesn’t ferment fast). Much more to my brewer’s sense of time! I got some orange blossom honey and 3 packets of yeast. I like to pitch huge amounts of yeast whenever possible, especially when I spend a bit of $$$ on the makin’s. 36 hours later, I thought the airlock was going to blow off! A day after that, the part of the basement where the carboy is smelled of mead & the airlock was happily bubbling away once a second.  

K1V-1116 makes a dry mead that can be sorbated and back-sweetened. I bottled one good sized bottle and primed it to make a sparkling mead, because the still mead tasted a lot like a complex champagne. It ended up not carbonating because the yeast had already crapped out. I should have added champagne yeast and re-corked it, but I drank it just the same. The rest was sulfited, sorbated & sweetened with more orange blossom honey. I liked the dry mead, but I like it slightly sweet better. It didn’t take much additional honey to make it perfect to my taste. I could drink a lot of this mead.

I think my next batch will be a ginger metheglin. Sounds like it will be so easy to drink that I’ll have to limit myself to one glass per day……..could be hangover material if I don’t. I’d also go with a semi-sweet yeast. Too sweet would kill the ginger’s flavor, I think. 

There is an incredible range of honey available out there, and they all make very different meads. The color, flavor, and consistency of the honey will be different, even from the same hive, dependent on what plant the bees were getting their nectar from. It can range from a very pale yellow to dark brown, and the flavor varies just as much. A mead will get most of its flavor from the honey, so if you decide to try making it, make sure you like the honey you’ve chosen. 3 gallons of something you don’t like can be a downer, especially if you had to wait a year to drink it.

And if you get the chance to try a mead, don't be shy. Drink up, and then grab a broadsword, put on a helmet with horns, & go sack a village!