Raspberry Mead

I've tried to make mead on a number of occasions and try is the operative word. It just never turns out quite right for me. I have bottles of mead stashed away on my brewing shelves and I keep them in the hope they will age up into something nice. Any bottles that I've sampled don't taste great so I have my doubts that age will help.

I decided to brew mead again with cheaper ingredients and on a smaller scale. It's been pretty warm here this summer which has been great but it's not ideal beer brewing weather. I've heard from a few of the home brewers that their beer fermentations have been very warm. One of my pet hates is beer that has been brewed too warm, I can taste it a mile off. When beer is fermented too warm the yeast can produce higher weight fusel alcohols which don't taste good, they're sort of harsh and nasty. I'm hoping that mead won't really suffer the same problems and maybe a warmer fermentation will give some fruity flavours to the mead. 

I dug out my copy of Making Wild Wines and Meads by Pattie Vargas and Rich Gulling. I like this book a lot, it gives a simple run through of how to brew at the start and the rest of the book is recipes. They're divided up into sections and include fruit wines, wines from nuts, flowers and vegetables, meads, melomels and metheglins and wines from herbs. I followed the raspberry melomel recipe exactly as it appears in the book in the hope that this will make it turn out right. I used honey from Lidl and frozen raspberries.  I meant it when I said cheap ingredients. I mixed up all the ingredients and added campden powder to kill any nasties. After twenty four hours I added some red wine yeast. 

The primary fermentation has just finished and I'm glad it has. It was quite vigorous and made the house stink. On most home brewing forums you'll find a thread where someone is complaining that his wife is giving out to him about his brewing and the smells. In my case the opposite is true but thankfully my husband likes the results of my brewing experiments. Though this mead has turned out a lurid pink colour so maybe he won't like this one as much. I'll rack this mead into a one gallon glass carboy tomorrow and then cover it up and forget about it for a month or two before I bottle it. Fingers crossed it will turn out ok this time.