OKAY THE FORUM WAS AN booty EARLIER AND I LOST MY POST
ROUND TWO
So yeah, made mead today. WE WERE SO EXCITED. This is an illustration of our elation. We imagine you are doing the same thing.
This is all of our stuff. We got, a 1gal glass jug, a rubber stopper, an airlock (more on those at the end), a gallon of distilled water, 7 lbs of pure raw honey (less sexual than it sounds, I promise), yeast, nutrient.
This is the kind of yeast that I used, since it's got a higher alcohol tolerance for when I want to make a drier mead, and it leaves less yeast flavor when fermented.
This is the massive tub of honey that I used half of. It's from somewhere that they use cyrillic script, because even with all the shipping tacked on for seven pounds, it was still cheaper than any raw honey I'd find around here. You might notice that it looks like ice cream and is weirdly pale. that is because it is almost entirely unprocessed (they took the time to skim the beeswax out of it, and that's pretty much all), and as such, it is very crystalized. Now, if you were to just give this to someone to eat plain, this would probably be an undesirable trait. That's why supermarket honey is so clear and processed. However, since we're dissolving it in water, the crystalization makes no difference. And if you're wondering why we use raw honey, it's because it has a fuller flavor. The more you process honey, the more it tastes like sugar water. Think actual cheddar cheese versus Kraft cheese sauce.
So to start off, I sanitized stuff by boiling water and CAREFULLY swishing it around the glass jar for about seven minutes. If you don't feel like risking a burn, then you can also just use a weak bleach solution. But Sloth has no bleach.
So then I poured about half the gallon of distilled water into the large pot, turned it to warm, and started scooping honey. This was to dissolve the honey in the water for the must. (everything looks smaller than it is because of the weird camera perspective).
HALF AN HOUR OF SCOOPING AND SEVERAL BENT SPOONS LATER, I scraped about half the tub out, and started melting it into the water. Keep in mind, I wasn't actually cooking it, just gently warming it.
This is when I took a pinch of the yeast nutrient to add. This isn't something that's absolutely required, but because I wanted to make it with just straight up honey, I opted to add some extra nutrition for the yeast, since honey just has plain sugar, which the yeast essentially get bored with, and work slowly. However, with the extra vitamins and minerals (that just sink to the bottom with the yeast cake anyway), they are much more efficient.
So we stirred it up, and this is what the must finally looked like.
And added yeast. You know, you'd think these little paper packets would be easy to open.
Nope.
BEHOLD THE POWER OF SCISSORS
IT IS DONE.
So yeah, after we dissolved and swished that around, I just ladled it into the jug and popped the rubber stopper in with the airlock.
Okay, now i mentioned that I would say a bit more on airlocks. The purpose of an airlock is to make sure that carbon dioxide from fermentation can get out, but air can't get in, because that would cause the must to rot. So, the way it works, is a tube goes through a hole in the rubber stopper up through the center of a plastic cup. at the top of that tube, there is a light, loose-fitting bulb that rests on top of it. Now, the plastic cup outside of the tube gets filled about half full of water so that the bottom part of the bulb is submerged, but it floats just enough to let gas come out of the tube. When the carbon dioxide builds up, it goes up to the stopper, through the tube, and then downward through the bulb into the water, where it bubbles out and eventually escapes through a perforated cap on top of the whole thing. They're a grand total of 89 cents, but if you really don't feel like dishing out that kind of cash, then you can essentially achieve the same effect with some rubber tubing leading into a paper cup full of water.
AND NOW WE WAIT.
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