Your Practical Guide To Self Reliant Living
I love the idea of putting a meal on the table by using ingredients we grew fresh on the homestead. So many desserts incorporate the flour, which is hard to grow on a small scale. Pots de creme are a traditional dessert that’s naturally gluten-free, and can be made using ingredients grown right in our backyard.
Honey, eggs, cream and lavender come together beautifully for these homemade honey lavender pots de creme.
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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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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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Elderberry syrup always helped me feel better as a child, as a natural cough syrup and to provide some much needed energy when I was sick. It’s comforting on the throat, and I’d begin to feel better almost immediately.
As an adult, I went to find a bottle and I was pretty shocked at the price tag. On average, it was about $3 per ounce. I was used to taking an ounce at a time in a shot glass, 2-3 times per day. That’s a pretty expensive habit if you’re sick for more than a day or two.
A quick check of the ingredients list and you’ll find that it’s actually just 3 ingredients: elderberry juice, honey and cider vinegar.
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Honey wine or mead is one of the oldest forms of alcohol, and with archeological evidence of early meads going back to 7000 bc. If our ancestors could brew it without running water, modern sanitation or equipment, I’m pretty sure you can manage it in your kitchen. Mead is especially simple when compared to all grain home brew beer, which can have a lot of complex ingredients and cook times that affect the final brew. Mead on the other hand has honey and yeast, plus a little bit of time.
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