Your Practical Guide To Self Reliant Living
Mead is a staple in our homebrew routine, and we’ve been making honey wines for over a decade. When it was time to brew another batch with rhubarb, I of course reached for the honey and started a bubbly honey based batch of homemade rhubarb mead. But wait…what if I want to taste the rhubarb, just the subtle delicious tangy notes of rhubarb, without the distraction and complexity of honey? Thus, why not. It’s time to make a rhubarb wine.
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Go looking for birch beer these days and you’ll find sugary sweet soda with just a few drops of birch oil added. That wasn’t always the case, and real birch beer, alcoholic birch beer, has been brewed for 100’s of years. Birch beer, birch wine and birch mead were made just about anywhere in the world birch trees grow.
Birch sap runs later in the spring than maple, when the temperatures are consistently above freezing. With all that warmth, it’s hard to keep birch sap from fermenting, so if you’re tapping birch trees, you might as well go with it.
The English make a birch beer with birch sap and sugar, and the Russians make a type of quick mead, called medovukha, from birch sap and honey. But why add other sugars? Birch syrup is sweet and tasty, and birch sap is plentiful. Why not make a pure birch beer, more like a birch wine almost, with just concentrated birch sap?
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Rhubarb has a sweet-tart flavor that comes through beautifully in homemade rhubarb mead. Though it’s technically a vegetable, the stalks contain both sugar and acid, which gives them a fruit-like flavor. That acidic sweetness makes them a good candidate for brewing.
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Dandelion wine captures the essence of summer. Sweet, floral and with subtle notes of honey, dandelion wine is tasty enough to bring out the forager in anyone. It takes quite a few dandelions to make wine, so it’s best to enlist the help of as many small children as possible.
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Mango wine has a reputation for capturing the very essence of mango in a light and sweet summer wine. I’ll ferment just about anything that’ll fit in a carboy, but somehow I’ve never gotten around to making it.
After 10 years of home brewing, adding yeast to anything with even a hint of promise, we always make our first batches small. I’ve made a few too many toxic 5-gallon batches to waste ingredients before I have a winning recipe. Single bottle quart batches are a great way to refine a recipe before investing a lot of money in homemade wine.
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While you may have heard of dandelion wine, there’s another tiny yellow flower that comes up even earlier in the spring. Coltsfoot wine is made from the bright yellow flower petals, and has a beautiful color and subtle taste. It also happens to be medicinal.
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The very best medicine is the one you’ll take. When you turn your medicine into mead, it becomes a true pleasure to take. No arm twisting required. Homemade elderberry mead combines honey with elderberries to create a sweet mead that will boost your immune system naturally.
Wild foraged elderberries can be sparse, and it’s often hard to find a dense patch. Birds often beat us to our own elderberry patch. That means we rarely have enough for a full one-gallon batch, let alone a traditional 5-gallon batch. Using a small batch method, we’ve started making a one-quart batch with a mason jar fermentation kit with great results.
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Every year I’m excited about fermenting up something tasty with raspberries. Raspberry wine, raspberry mead or even a light summery raspberry beer. Just one problem…raspberries are wicked expensive. Do you know how many raspberries it takes to make even a gallon of raspberry wine?
For beer or mead, it takes about a quart in a one gallon batch, or over a gallon of fresh fruit in a 5 gallon batch to really get the flavor to come through. Around these parts, even pick your own berries are pricey, and those from my own raspberry patch are gobbled before they hit the bowl.
So why not a micro batch?
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There are a lot of great reasons to make a micro batch mead. A super tiny batch is a great place to start if you’re just learning the process of mead making or if your an experienced brewer but you’re trying out something experimental. Medicinal brews, using medicinal herbs, are also a great match for micro batches because more often than not you’re taking smaller doses and don’t need a whole gallon, let alone 5 gallons.
I’m going to walk you through the basics of making a one quart batch of plain mead. If you’re a beginner without a lot of equipment, give it a try. For the rest of you interest in micro batches, this is a good jumping off point, and this recipe can be adapted based on your own creativity. Want to add herbs? Or fruit? Or cider? Or just go crazy and toss in hot peppers and mustard seed? Go for it.
My goal here is to give you the basics of super tiny batches so that you have a foundation for your own experimentation.
Micro batch linden flower mead with fresh wild foraged linden flowers, using this micro batch method.
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These days, home brewers generally make mead in either 1 gallon or 5 gallon batches. Why? Mostly because that’s how the equipment is setup. Brewing vesicles, or carboys, come in one gallon or five gallon sizes, and the available equipment shapes how we brew.
Fermentation equipment is evolving. With the increased interest in home lacto-fermentation, there’s been a lot of innovation that helps both lacto-fermenters and home brewers alike. New small scale fermentation kits that adapt mason jars into home fermentation vesicles are readily available. With a mason jar fermentation kit, any wide mouth mason jar (pint, quart or half gallon) can be turned into a fermentation carboy for your own micro batch meads.
There are a lot of reasons to scale down your batch and make micro brew quantities. Depending on the brew, as little as a pint may be appropriate for medicinal brews or something experimental. If you don’t need convincing, here’s a basic primer on how to make your first 1 quart batch of mead. Otherwise, read on…
Micro batch elderberry mead (1 quart batch)
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