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This is a brief article about how Mead is made.

I have another article here on the beer alcohol blog that explains what mead is and I give you a short history of this wonderful wine made from honey. In this article I give you a brief overview of how it is made.

The process for making mead is quite a simple one and if I could boil it down to the basics all you really have to do is add honey, water and yeast together – then wait for it to ferment and age. That is the whole process! Wow, pretty simple right? And well, you could do it that way but there are a few more things that should be done if you want your mead to be tasty and successful!

The most important thing about mead making

There is one factor that overrides all other factors when it comes to making mead. You have to make sure you take the utmost care in sanitizing everything and keeping everything pure while it is fermenting. This is where making mead gets to be a little more complicated.  The reason for this is that you are creating a batch of honey, water and other things like fruit and spices. Let’s say you just left this batch exposed to the air. What would happen?  It would quickly become contaminated by bacteria, wild yeast and all other kinds of unwanted things. It is , after all, a rich solution of food just waiting to be devoured by micro-organisms.

So, sanitation is your number one priority when making mead. Wash everything including containers, spoons, and siphoning hoses in some kind of solution made for sanitizing food stuffs. There are many readily available chemicals that will only cost around five dollars including EZ clean.

The Process of Making Mead

This is an overview of the steps you take when making mead.

• Sanitize all your equipment
• Mix honey and water together, approximately 1 quart of honey per gallon of water – stir and shake it very vigorously to make it homogenous. And when you are done stirring and shaking stir and shake it some more.
• Add your fruits or spices to the mix
• This whole mixture you have created is called the “Must”.
• Pre treat your yeast by adding it to about a cup of warm water. Each type of yeast will have a recommended way to pre-treat. This revives the yeast from it’s dormant state and prepares it for the must.
• Gently stir the yeast into the Must (This process is called “Pitching” the yeast.
• Cover it and put an airlock on it. It is absolutely necessary to have some kind of airlock. This allows gases to escape from the mead while not allowing anything to get into the batch.
• Within 24 hours the airlock on  your mead will start bubbling vigorously. This is a good sign.
• After a period of time (usually 2-4 weeks) the bubbling of the airlock will taper off dramatically and you can optionally siphon all the liquid into a new container (This process is called racking). At this point a thick layer of sediment will have formed at the bottom of the jug. Leave all this sediment behind and dispose of it.
• Place the airlock on your new jug. This is because the ferment is still occurring -but at a slower pace.
• Allow it to age for a minimum of six months before drinking. You can optionally rack it again at monthly intervals. This will clarify it quicker and give it a subtler taste.

Will Kalif has been a mead maker for many years. You can visit his website for lots more mead making tutorials, articles and videos. The Joy of Mead Making

Denver has a new brewery! Strange Brewing Company opened a few months ago. Located just south of Invesco Field this small brewery is a place you need to visit. I will review each beer they make but I can tell you that this brewery is going places.

I had the Farmhouse Ale and Cherry Kriek and loved both. Farmhouse is a high alcohol content beer but you would never know it. Everything blends together nicely. Cherry Kriek is a dark beer named after Cherry Creek. Featuring a nice cherry taste it is hard to describe this beer with words. You need to go taste it.

Pictures to come!

I am a huge fan of New Belgium beers. I have had every beer they make multiple times and taken their brewery tour a half dozen times. That is why it is so odd for me to be writing a review on their beer, it is as commonplace to me as Bud Light is to most of America. Anyways, here we go.

Beer: Fat Tire

Brewery: New Belgium Brewery, Fort Collins, CO

Style: American Amber / Red Ale

ABV: 5.2%

Serving Type: Can

BeerAlcoholBlog.com Rating: 4.5 Stars

Notes: I was already a huge fan of Fat Tire in either a draft or bottle format but when I received a chance to taste it in a can I was stunned. My first taste was from a can taken right off the New Belgium canning line during a VIP tour. (March of 09) From that very first can to the 12-pack I purchased on Sunday, this beer never disappoints. The canned version of Fat Tire is can conditioned which makes it taste like it was just poured from the brewery. 

This beer is not available in all 50 states yet but if you ever come across it you need to purchase some.

Awesome amber color with a whitish beige head

Nice strong flavor

Craft Beer's Amazing Growth in a Down Economy

Craft beer industry laughs in the face of global meltdown. In these trying economic times, the craft beer industry has continued to grow, not only in the US but it has also become the beacon of brewing creativity around the world, with their beers and their creative fervor being the catalyst for Craft-Beer revolutions in countries like Denmark, Sweden and even Great Britain. The bad news for the beer industry as a whole is that overall beer sales were down approximately five million barrels in 2009.Yet, last year; the craft beer industry experienced perhaps its most stellar performance ever. Nationally, the craft brewing industry grew a little more than 10%.

Wynkoop Brewery is releasing a limited release beer called Tut's Royal Gold to accompany Denver Art Museum’s Tutankhamun The Golden King and the Great Pharaohs exhibit. Tut is an Ale with pale malts, ancient fermentables (honey, wheat, teff) and a list of spices that includes tamarind, coriander, grains of paradise, orange peel and rose petals. The result is a beer with an ABV of 6%.

Personally I wonder why Colorado's main breweries were not used. We have Coors and New Belgium breweries here. Seems odd that for an event in Denver the beer was made by the Mayors brewery Wynkoop Brewing Company.

All politics aside, we will be reviewing this beer as soon as we can get our hands on it. Click here for more information about Tut's beer.

Mead is a very misunderstood beverage. Over the centuries it has been characterized as a bitter and cloudy beverage that only Vikings with strong stomachs would drink. Nothing could be further from the truth and I believe that the Vikings themselves started this rumor just so they could keep the golden beverage all to themselves!

So What is Mead?

It is a wine that is fermented with honey instead of grapes. It is pretty much as simple as that and if you think about it doesn’t it make sense that it would be a beautiful and sweet beverage? And that it is. A typical gallon of Mead uses about three pounds of honey which is about one quart and that is one quarter of the volume. That is a lot of honey.

So, why isn’t mead very well known?