Joe's Ancient Orange Mead Recipe (2024)

FAQs

How many oranges to put in mead? ›

Ingredients: 1 gallon batch. 3 ½ lbs Clover or your choice honey or blend (will finish sweet) 1 Large orange (later cut in eights or smaller, rind and all)

Wash the orange, cut it into slices that will easily fit in the jug (getting them out is less work if the pieces are small) and stuff them in. Add the raisins, cloves and cinnamon stick. Fill the jug, leaving two inches of airspace for bubbles and foam.

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.

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.

Remove the fruit bag after about 7–14 days, or rack the mead away from the fruit to a second fermenter. Leaving the fruit in too long can result in flavor and haze issues.

Ken introduces his “Noble” fruits which he believes are the top fruits to use in meads including fruits like tart cherries, raspberries, currants and blackberries. We discuss how the acidity and tannins provide the flavor and structure needed for a large gravity mead with a substantial amount of residual sweetness.

Some people add lemon or other citrus juices to mead as a source of acid to help balance out the sweet flavor of the honey, but this is by no means mandatory. Adding sugar or honey will not actually neutralize the acid or change the pH; it will only help to balance the flavor as David had mentioned.

Melomel is simply defined as a mead made with fruit. It can be sweet or dry. The fruit can either be fermented or added after the honey is fermented in a melomel.

Day 1, preferably during a waxing moon, to encourage the mead to ripen: Clean the stockpot with a bleach solution and rinse well. Put cloves, cinnamon, cardamom and lemon peel in about 2 quarts of water and simmer for about 15 minutes, until the spices have scented the water.

Ingredients – Primary

This is a mead I've been wanting to do for a while. Ginger is a fairly simple flavor, but is a huge favorite among many brewers, and partakers, alike.

How many cinnamon sticks for mead? ›

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.

Traditional meads usually require six months to 2 years for the flavors to mellow and smooth and any off flavors to diminish. Melomels or fruit meads can take six months to 5 years for the flavors to fully integrate and the tannins and acids to mellow. Metheglin or spiced meads are quicker, six months to a year.

Stirring twice a day is generally sufficient (if you have a fast fermentation, you might want to stir three or four times a day).

There are 4 to 5 tablespoons or 1/4 to 1/3 cups of juice in one orange. To make one cup of fresh orange juice, you need three oranges. It's important to note this amount is for common oranges. Different varieties of orange, such as Valencia, navel, mandarin, or blood oranges will produce different quantities of juice.

Figuring out how many oranges go into an 8-ounce cup isn't quite so nebulous, but it's still not an exact science – the general rule of thumb is that three, medium-sized oranges equals eight ounces of juice.

If you're looking to make a gallon (about 16 glasses) of. grape juice, you'll need 14 pounds of grapes. You'll need about 85 to 90 pounds of fresh grapes to.

It depends on the size, variety, and juiciness of the orange, but orange juice packager Tropicana puts the number at 36 oranges per gallon of juice. Citrus America, a company that makes juicing equipment for supermarkets and restaurants puts the number at 48 oranges per gallon.