Raspberry Mead – Micro Batch Recipe (2024)

FAQs

How much raspberries for 1 gallon of mead? ›

You'll need 3 pounds of honey and roughly 6 ounces of raspberries per gallon.

Keep fermentation temps up to around 70° or 75° F. Fermentation should last between 10 to 20 days. Rack into a conditioning vessel and bulk age for 3 to 6 months. Bottle, then enjoy now and again to see how it's progressing.

How Much Honey Should I Use? In this recipe, you can choose exactly how sweet you'd like your wine to be. We'll go over it in further detail later, but we recommend using between two and three pounds of honey per gallon of mead — 2 pounds if you want it on the dryer side, and 3 pounds if you'd like it to be sweeter.

The ratio of water to honey depends on the type of mead you want to make. For a dry mead, the ratio is 4 parts water to 1 part honey; a sweet mead is 2 to 1. Kluz likes his mead sweet, so he typically uses 1 3/4 gallons of honey and tops it off with 3 1/4 gallons of water.

A good starting point with most fruits is about 3 pounds of fruit per gallon of mead, though I have been known to use 5 or even 6 pounds of fruit. Fruit blends can produce some great-tasting meads.

Average yield per plant is 1 to 2 quarts of raspberries.

Keep in mind that a one-gallon batch will almost always ferment faster than a five-gallon batch, but there are a few techniques for speeding up both. To put it simply, mead has a lot of sugars.

If you're using less honey to make more of a beer-like mead, those can be fully fermented and drinkable in under a month. Other types can take a few months. It just depends on the amount of honey. Amount of honey primarily is what it depends on, and some yeasts ferment honey faster than others.

Stirring twice a day is generally sufficient (if you have a fast fermentation, you might want to stir three or four times a day). Stirring does a couple of things: It blows off carbon dioxide, which lowers potential yeast stress, and it adds oxygen to your mead when the yeast can use it best.

Especially if you are making traditional mead, if you simply dump a bunch of honey and water together and throw in some yeast, the yeast may get stressed and not fully ferment.

Does more honey make mead stronger? ›

Potentially, using the most amount of honey can lead to up 18% ABV which makes it a strong beverage. Using one pound, or 1.3 cups, of honey tends to result in a very light drink in terms of both flavor and alcohol content. That is expected since the yeast will not have much to eat.

Many producers of mead like to use clover honey in their products because clover is so readily available. Clover honey is usually available in huge quantities and has a fairly consistent flavor, achieved by blending with a number of different sources.

Why did it fall out of favor? There were some new tax laws, as well as an increased availability of West Indian sugar in the 17th century that made honey harder and less necessary to obtain. But it was also the rise of other alcohols—namely beer and wine—that really did it in.

Back to your question: What happens if a winemaker adds too much yeast? Probably not much—there's only so much sugar in the grapes for the yeast to convert, and that limits how much work there is for yeast to do.

1/2 a clove per gallon (These are quite strong, 1-2 in a 5 gallon batch is good – Though the flavour will mellow a lot during the ageing process.) This recipe will yield a medium bodied mead. adjust the volume of honey to your liking. Less will produce a dryer mead and more will produce a sweeter mead.

Crush the fruit with a blender. Pour the fruit puree into the fermentation jar. Rack the mead from the carboy to the fermentation jar, taking care to leave as much lees as possible at the bottom of the carboy.

A new planting in sandy loam soil requires 18 gallons per day per 100 feet of row. A mature planting in the same soil type requires 27 gallons per day per 100 feet of row. Increase the water rate for sandier soil, and decrease it for heavier soil.

One pound of raspberries is about four heaping palmfuls of marble-sized berries.