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Sima/Mead Recipe.

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Haddox

NewBee
Registered Member
Mar 25, 2004
2
0
0
www.peanut-gallery.net
Hello everyone. I'm new to making mead, I'm trying this simple recipe I got off a website first:

Seems like our home brewed mead here in Finland differs from that described above. Surprisingly, Finnish mead is not necessarily alcoholic! And we don't use honey but sugars.
Ingredients:


500g white sugar
500g brown sugar
8l water
wee bit of rising powder (about 1/4 teaspoon)
2 lemons
raisins
How to:
Bring 2 litres of water to the boil. Mix sugars with boiled water. You may replace white sugar with brown one if you want to have darker mead. Add rest of the water and ensure in the end the temperature meets the requirements of rising powder (i.e. ~37C). Add rising powder. Extract juices from lemons and add juices to the pot.
Let the mixture stand still until the next day.
Embottle the mixture and add a tablespoonful of sugar into each bottle. You may also add few optional raisins if you want to. Don't screw the corks too tight because the pressure inside the bottles will increase.
Mead will be ready for drinking after 3 days if you keep the bottles in the room temperature (~20C) but it will take about a week if you store them in cold. Mead should be consumed within a week.

Enjoy!


But instead of using wine yeast, I used bread yeast. How do you think this will turn out, and what do you think the alcohol volume will be when it's ready?
 

JamesP

Senior Member
Lifetime GotMead Patron
Dec 3, 2003
654
1
18
Brisbane Australia
First point:

No Honey = No Mead

ie, You have a wine here.

Secondly:

1kg sugar in 8 Litres (ignoring white sugar vs brown and sugar in lemons and raisins) means approx. 5.6% Alc if fermented to SG 1.0 (or approx. 6 % if fermented dry)

There is a program you can download from the net called WineCalc that will do these calculations for you (no affiliation, etc, ...)

Replace 1kg sugar with 1.25Kg honey (make half light and half dark honey to emulate white & brown sugar), and add a pinch of nutrient (from homebrew shop) if you are worried it won't ferment quickly enough.
If you use some dark honey, it may have enough nutrient to help the fermentation along.

It will be yeasty, because it won't have had time to fully clarify, so bread yeast probably won't be noticed.

Cheers,
James
 

ThistyViking

NewBee
Registered Member
Nov 15, 2003
529
0
0
Personally i'm of the same opinion in reguards to honey needed for mead, the web is full of sites calling Sima Finnish mead. <shrug> Guess they think differently in sweeden, thanks for giving him the ABV, i asked him to post here, and had to leave town thus failing to reply in a timely manner as i had told him i would.
 
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