It is nice to have an alcoholic beverage at the end of the day to wind down after some hard work.  After having lived here for so long and having tried all of the drinks available, I have had to go back to my student pass-time of brewing.   In this climate, rum and spirits are generally too strong; the cheap spirits aren’t distilled well enough to enjoy; the expensive spirits that could be enjoyed burn a hole in our pockets; wine is also expensive and generally crap, no matter where it has come from (and has sat at customs in a container in 45C heat for weeks to months); and the beer is fine if you just like a light lager style.  Unfortunately, this situation is unacceptable to a Gnome of my (lack) of sophistication and home brewing has become a necessity for a continued existence.  Brewing is fun and, as the Italians would put it, the result doesn’t taste of copper.

I’ve already talked about malting corn and making gluten-free beer from it but this requires quite a bit of work to get happening:  the sprouting, kilning, roasting, mashing…it all ends up taking something like six weeks to get accomplished.  So, the next logical answer is mead.  I’m not at the stage of producing my own honey but fortunately, rainforest honey is available here and turns out to be much easier to brew than beer.

Traditional mead ends up being quite strong, 12-14%, and I find that this level of alcohol only allows a small drink, any more and the price is a headache.  So I have reduced the concentration of honey in my meads so that the final result is closer to a beer, say 4-5%.  This allows one to drink a pint without getting drunk and also appreciate the flavour of something different.

This is the honey that I use:

You can see that it is a dark honey and if you could taste it, the strong almost musky flavour would be very evident.

It all gets poured into a big pot with added water to make five gallons and boiled for five or ten minutes to sterilize it.  Then the specific gravity is checked once cooled down…

…to make sure that the concentration of sugar is right (to make a 5% strength mead).  It is put in a brew bin and fermented with some lager yeast for a few months as mead generally takes longer to brew than normal beer.

I’ve been making “everyday” batches to drink early, like a Beaujolais nouveau (without being red, obviously), since Munchkin really likes mead for an evening drink and to cook with but I’ve also put some away to slowly clear and age.  Eventually bottling it so that it can have a nice fizz.

I’ll let you know in a few months how the “special brew” turns out!

Cheers!

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