Good stuff to read

I figured it would be advantageous to study a bit before preparing my first mead. There are quite a lot of recipes on the internet but most leave out what I think is significant details of the brew such as honey types, OG, fermentation temperatures, yeast selections, etc. Basically all the information needed to repeat the mead.

I also found that danish mead recipes are often based on old recipes and are often spiked with alcohol. In my opinion an old recipe does not necessarily live up the expectations to an alcoholic beverage today. Honey would have been more difficult to obtain, and what was available perhaps not as clean of wax and bee parts as every hobby bee-keeper today are able to produce. Secondly, mead was also often prepared from leftovers in honey boards or even old (wet) honey in which microorganisms was growing. Hence, according to these recipes, one typically boil the crap out of the honey and add spices which have a strong taste. To top it off wild yeast was used, which would add a certain randomness to the taste

Fortunately, the purity and freshness of the starting materials today can be easily controlled. So why not produce mead with minimal boiling and try to balance tastes between a few ingredients.

As always a quick search in Wikipedia will quickly give you the basics. The list of mead categories was an excellent input when deciding what kind of mead to make and also great search words when looking for various recipes of a certain kind of mead. I decided that my first mead should be a cyser, but bochet and capsicumel are curiosities I just have to try later :o)

The cyser that I made is based on the recipe by Snoremark (Snoremarks Mjød) which won a price in 2011 at the danish honey festival. I figured there would be a fair chance to get decent mead on the first try. Again, lots of the specific details are missing from the recipe and the mead that I prepared will only conceptually the same. Fingers crossed that it will still be good.

I recently got hold of a book called "The complete Meadmaker" by Ken Schramm. It is highly recommendable reading. It is clear that the book is from US where field are so huge that you can claim something like "Star Thistle Honey". Recipes where you are mixing two kinds of honey 1:3 seems like a joke considering how expensive specialized honey is. Also, you have to have a huge field for it to be large enough to claim a pure flower type of the honey - No problem in US but in a small country like Denmark you will have to settle for season variations of honey :o)