Hullo and happy Summer Solstice!

Welcome to GotMead and welcome to the addiction!

And a festive summer solstice to you!

Sod the soltice Mel. The henge and Amesbury are about equidistant between you and me..... except I'm closer to the bloody M25 (only 4 hours today).

Yer in the right place for meads and the making. The mystical stuff isn't my cup of tea but we've plenty of excellent knowledge for making and can usually suss out sensible equivalents for some ingredients if necessary (they don't know how easy they have it in the US, with the massive choice of ingredients and kit.....).

Good luck with your efforts and welcome to the forums. Have a read of the NewBee guide (linked left hand dialogue box) anf the JAO recipe in chap 6 is an easy straight forward start.....

Happy mid-summer to ya!!! I'm also new to the brew crew here.
I live up in them thar hills of the appalachians in western maryland where most folk haven't heard of mead. I'm hoping to change that for some!
Good luck with your future and present mead making

MHoughton1989 said:

Cornwall is pretty full of mead though, but a little bit of a drive from here!

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I did 10 years with the RN, and wasn't surprised to find out, when I was based in Devonport, that I lived closer to Paris, than to Plymouth.

I soon learned, that once I hit south of Exeter, then it definitely becomes the twilight zone.........

Have a good look around though, you might find that while there isn't much actually made in the Bristol area, there might be a good place that sells a decent range. Like there's one near me, that keeps 7 or 8 different commercial meads - though having tasted 4 of them, they're all far too sweet for my taste - I did a rather unscientific test 3 or 4 years back and they were all testing at the 1.035 to 1.040 area for sweetness, which to my way of thinking, is basically a stuck ferment.

I find it best to ferment dry (well as dry as I can) then bring it back up to about the 1.010 to 1.015 area, with back sweetening honey.

Your biggest difficulty, will likely be, finding local equivalents of some of the ingredients mentioned here (or over at "Homebrewtalk" if you register there as well - there's some good info in their mead forum). A good choice of honey varietals isn't so easy to find, especially if what with your spiritual interest, you wanted to focus on the more traditional types.

IMO, your mead will only be as good as your honey and yeast. Yeast is easy (relatively speaking), as it's just a mail order away, but nice honey ? Well it's probably worth suggesting that you search out local bee keepers or even the nearest branch of the BBKA, as they might be able to direct you toward apiaries/ists, who will sell raw honey i.e. not filtered, blended or otherwise processed (bits of wax, propylis, dead bee's etc aren't a problem as they all come out in the making).

Hullo there and welcome! My husband and I are Heathen/Asatru so I hear ya on ritual/camping/party use. Glad Midsummer!

Simon, at The Sacred Trust in Dorset, makes mead, but not in large quantities.