Joe's Ancient Orange Mead Recipe (2024)

FAQs

How many oranges for a gallon of mead? ›

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) 1 small handful of raisins (25 if you count but more or less ok)

The average mead recipe calls for 3 to 3.5 pounds of honey per gallon of finished mead, depending on the sugar content of the honey. This makes strong mead in the range of 14 percent alcohol.

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.

One gallon of juice is produced from 13 pounds of oranges; the shipping differences are correspondingly large. Additionally, when oranges are destined to be sold to the consumer whole, the trees they grown on are treated with more pesticides and fertilizers to ensure shelf-stability and visual appeal for consumers.

You can drink mead like a port or sherry – a slightly bigger tot at the end of the evening or a particularly nice meal. You can drink it in a wine glass throughout the evening like a nice bottle of wine – most go well with food. You could even go full Viking and enjoy your mead from a drinking horn!

Typical viking mead, alcohol level ranges from 4-8%, but can be higher. Mead is sweet and deceptively crushable, with a big honey flavor.

Aging mead blends science and personal discovery, leading to a satisfying, personalized taste experience. Maturing mead over time enables desirable flavors to meld and evolve, allowing harsh flavors to diminish.

If you put in a bunch of honey and you get enough yeast (the right kind of yeast where it ferments all the way out) then you'll have a really dry, high alcohol champagne-like mead. You can use less honey to make a lower alcohol mead. Using less honey might make it a little bit more dry, though not necessarily.

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.

Lalvin D-47

This white wine yeast is the primary choice for many mead makers. It ferments at a moderate to fast pace with little foaming and is good for medium to dry meads. It tends to accentuate the honey characteristics so it is a good choice for traditional varietal mead.

Why does no one drink mead anymore? ›

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.

Fusels are the hot, solvent like taste (many folks say gasoline, paint thinner, or rocket fuel) you generally get in a young mead. When fusels are present, you have to age the mead until the yeast metabolize them. Aging time to drinkable mead largely depends on the amount of fusels produced to begin with.

Tannin- This will give you a counter point to the mead's sweetness. I use black tea for mine. 5 bags of any black tea will do. You're using the black tea for the tannins not the flavor of the tea.

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.

Acid blend is also added at between 1/4 tsp – 1/2 tsp per gallon.

Want to make mead using apples? Here's what you need to do to make a delicious cyser: Then cut or press the equivalent of 3-6 sanitized, cleaned apples per gallon and/or add 1/4 to 1/2 gallon of your favorite cider or juice per gallon of expected volume.