Pulsegleaner
Garden Master
- Joined
- Apr 18, 2014
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- Location
- Lower Hudson Valley, New York
Might as well leave the rest of the tips here for when @Marie2020 comes back (and for anyone else who might make use of them).
Most of the rest of the tips have to do which choosing WHAT honey you use. Any honey will make mead, but many honeys make rather bland uninspired mead.
Here is what I have worked out so far from my experiments.
1. Don't try and guess the taste of the mead from the taste of the honey. Many of my best meads came from honeys I thought tasted rather foul.
2. A lot of books tell you you have to mix honeys to make good mead. That's sort of half true. What they should say is that you want a mixed honey for your mead. That is, you want your honey to be multifloral ( from many types of flowers) rather than monofloral (from only one type). You can, of course also use monofloral honeys and mix them, But a single flower origin honey tends to yield a single note, rather flat flavored mead.
3. Darker honey makes richer meads,
4. I tend to think tree honeys make better meads than flower honeys, but that's just me. Tree honeys are often darker than flower ones, so that's probably part of it. And in truth, since "Forest Honey" probably contains both trees AND flowers, it's probably a mix.
5. EXPERIMENT. I have tried pretty much ANY honey from ANYWHERE at one time or another. Some worked, some didn't.
Am currently working on one with forest honey from New Zealand. Hoping it will work a bit better than the Australian one (There's nothing wrong with the Australian, but any Australian honey that's from a wild forested region will tend to be mostly nectar from eucalyptus and acacia (wattle) species, and those tend to end up dominating it, as does any leucospermum (manuka or tea tree) if it is in the area*
*BTW if anyone is in Australia and can figure out a way to send me some Beechworth Banksia honey to play around with I would be grateful (I can get some Beechworth stuff here, but the monofolorals tend to not get as far as here.)
Most of the rest of the tips have to do which choosing WHAT honey you use. Any honey will make mead, but many honeys make rather bland uninspired mead.
Here is what I have worked out so far from my experiments.
1. Don't try and guess the taste of the mead from the taste of the honey. Many of my best meads came from honeys I thought tasted rather foul.
2. A lot of books tell you you have to mix honeys to make good mead. That's sort of half true. What they should say is that you want a mixed honey for your mead. That is, you want your honey to be multifloral ( from many types of flowers) rather than monofloral (from only one type). You can, of course also use monofloral honeys and mix them, But a single flower origin honey tends to yield a single note, rather flat flavored mead.
3. Darker honey makes richer meads,
4. I tend to think tree honeys make better meads than flower honeys, but that's just me. Tree honeys are often darker than flower ones, so that's probably part of it. And in truth, since "Forest Honey" probably contains both trees AND flowers, it's probably a mix.
5. EXPERIMENT. I have tried pretty much ANY honey from ANYWHERE at one time or another. Some worked, some didn't.
Am currently working on one with forest honey from New Zealand. Hoping it will work a bit better than the Australian one (There's nothing wrong with the Australian, but any Australian honey that's from a wild forested region will tend to be mostly nectar from eucalyptus and acacia (wattle) species, and those tend to end up dominating it, as does any leucospermum (manuka or tea tree) if it is in the area*
*BTW if anyone is in Australia and can figure out a way to send me some Beechworth Banksia honey to play around with I would be grateful (I can get some Beechworth stuff here, but the monofolorals tend to not get as far as here.)
