Honey, Water, Yeast, Time: Making Mead at Home

In about four months you can put a bottle on a table that nobody in the room can buy anywhere. That's the whole appeal of this, and it's far more achievable than it looks: mead is four ingredients, and one of them is time.The oldest alcoholic drink we can prove people made had honey in it, fermented in China around 7000 BCE, five hundred years before the earliest grape wine. Most books about mead open in a Viking hall instead. That gap is why every historical claim in this one carries a grade: hard evidence, documented, inferred, or myth.This is a practical book about making mead in an ordinary kitchen, by somebody who's been doing it for five years and has the broken demijohns to prove it. It covers the small number of things that actually decide whether a batch is good, and it says plainly which of the arguments you'll find online turned out not to matter.If you already own a starter kit you've never opened, chapter 8 is for you. One gallon, nine steps, and a week-by-week table of what you should expect to see. Part Three is thirty pages on what to do when it goes wrong, because it will.WHAT IS INSIDE Part One, how mead works: honey, equipment, sanitation, gravity and alcohol, yeast and nutrients, racking and bottling, and a start-to-finish first batch. Part Two, forty-five recipes in eight groups: the oldest drink, the traditionals, the Nordic table, the Levant, Ethiopia, fruit, spice, and a set of experiments that are nobody's tradition but the author's. Part Three, when it goes wrong: stuck fermentation, violent fermentation, off smells, haze, bottle pressure, and which faults age out. Appendices: gravity and alcohol tables, the nutrient schedule, metric conversions, and every source with its evidence grade.- Everything you need for a first gallon, and nothing you don't- Why a mead stalls, and the rescue almost no book gives you- The one mistake in this hobby that can actually hurt you- What ages out of a young mead, and what never willYou'll need honey, water, yeast and patience. The patience is the hard part.