JAO - First Mead!

We started our first mead today, my husband Brian has already done this in the past, but this is my first time.

We used this recipe for Joe's Ancient Orange, found at gotmead.com. Here is the recipe in case the link disappears later.


Ingredients

3 1/2 lbs Clover or your choice honey or blend (will finish sweet) 
1 Large orange (later cut in eights or smaller rind and all) 
1 small handful of raisins (25 if you count but more or less ok) 
1 stick of cinnamon 
1 whole clove (or 2 if you like - these are potent critters) 
optional (a pinch of nutmeg and allspice)(very small) 
1 teaspoon of Fleismanns bread yeast (now don't get holy on me--- after all this
is an ancient mead and that's all we had back then)
Balance water to one gallon


Directions

Use a clean 1 gallon carboy (We used an empty one gallon glass apple juice jug)

Dissolve honey in some warm water and add to jug (I warmed about 2 quarts of water for this.)

Wash orange well to remove any pesticides and slice in small pieces,then add to jug, rinds included

Put in raisins, clove, cinnamon stick, nutmeg, and allspice, then fill to 3 inches from the top with cold water (need room for some foam -- you can top off with more water after the yeast activity dies down.)

Shake the heck out of the jug with top on, of course. This is your sophisticated aeration process.

When at room temperature in your kitchen. Put in 1 teaspoon of bread yeast. You can give it a gentle swirl if you like.

Install water airlock. Put in dark place. It will start working immediately or in an hour. After major foaming stops in a few days add some water and then keep your hands off of it. 

After 2 months it will slow down to a stop and clear all by itself. Then you can rack it. It does better in a kitchen in the dark. (like in a cabinet) likes a little heat (70-80).

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What we did:

We used an empty one gallon glass apple juice jug as our carboy. We sanitized all our equipment, bubblers, hydrometer, bottle, anything that was going to touch the ingredients.

Heated 1.5 quarts of water in the kettle then added about two cups of cool water making it about 150 degrees Fahrenheit, then put the honey and water in a large pot and stirred the honey around till it dissolved, then added it to the jug.

Next, I sliced the orange up into small pieces and put all that into the jug, along with 28 raisins, cinnamon stick, 1 clove, and the spices (we used about 1/16th of a teaspoon of each spice.)

Then we added water up to the one gallon line, shook it like crazy, added more water to 3 inches below the top and shook it up again.

After calibrating our hydrometer with reverse osmossis water to 1.000 our original gravity was 1.129.

Then it sat in the kitchen to cool to room temperature.

I planned to add my yeast around midnight at the latest, but my neighbor talked till nearly 4 AM, so I'm a little late. But the yeast is in! I filled the bubbler.

Now the waiting. See ya in a couple months.

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Notes: Next time we should use the scale to weigh the spices. Edit 09/15/12: We tried to weigh them this time around but my scale wouldn't register the weight, so I guess we need to get a scale from High Times. (;