*Stop telling me to soak my barrels. We soaked these for a full month before using them- I am not exaggerating. They leaked anyway.* The Elder Scrolls Cookbook: amzn.to/3XJN3MC All In One Home Beer Brewing Mash and Boil Device: amzn.to/3HA52PV Brewing Airlock Kit: amzn.to/3ja70gq Oak Aging Barrels: amzn.to/3XHYHHN Kitchen Funnel: amzn.to/3wvQbiS Hydrometer: amzn.to/3ZZy4zD Glass Cylinders: amzn.to/3wyXNBo Kveik Brewing Yeast: amzn.to/3WKmzci Culinary Lavender: amzn.to/3Y1p3Eh Dried Rose Hips: amzn.to/3HE6m4m The “good” cinnamon sticks: amzn.to/3Ra8xzD Juniper Berries: amzn.to/3XL4MTC Dried Yarrow: amzn.to/3HAdoHe Dried Hibiscus: amzn.to/3JnNaJq Twitch: bit.ly/2VsOi3d H2D2: bit.ly/YTH2D2 twitter: bit.ly/H2DTwit instagram: bit.ly/H2dIG Blog: bit.ly/H2DBlog Patreon: bit.ly/H2DPatreon Gear: amzn.to/2LeQCbW Drinks from Skyrim: ruclips.net/video/yAKSf6IznTc/видео.html A drink for vikings?: ruclips.net/video/3HAoHT_8QTQ/видео.html Viking Beer & Mead: ruclips.net/video/66Oiql5Z_dE/видео.html
I used to work at a brewery/meadery/winery/distillery, and we used to be suuuuuper specific with everything but that was commercial and whatnot. Then when home brewing that kind of went waaaaay down😂
Blackbriar mead, in a cut quest that's still in the game files, had salt as a secret ingredient! The purpose was supposedly that the customer drank the mead, unknowingly got more thirsty and drank more mead until being so drunk they'd not notice their thirst. It was all some sneaky way for the criminal Blackbriar family to sell more mead.
I always imagine that blackbriar mead must not taste great. Simply because I totally believe the Blackbriars would cut it with fillers to just get more volume out of brews.
As someone who's made mead several times, I can tell you that they taste best after being aged a year. Yes, they're drinkable after 3-4 months, but I beg you to let them sit just a bit longer. It's unreal how much the taste refines and improves. Also, use a wine yeast - Lalvin 71b is my favorite. It can take the ABV up like 14% if the conditions are right! Ale yeasts won't really take it beyond 6-7%. Once made a blueberry mead that was delicious AND gave you a noticeable buzz after just 1 glass.
The exception to this is short mead/hydromels, though that's obviously not what's being made here. There is some evidence that historic meads were brewed to a lower ABV and were served younger with some carbonation. Modern meads are made with carefully selected yeast strains and better sanitation/techniques, so we can brew reliably stronger meads and age them without ill effect.
@@Pseud0nymTXT A lot of people backsweeten to taste, though I prefer a drier finish on most of mine. First, if you're bottling and carbonating your mead, you need to make sure to use a bottle that can handle the pressure. Beer bottles are generally fine, but you need to be more selective if you use wine bottles. Champagne bottles use thicker glass and more secure corks when compared to a bordeaux bottle. If you have any yeast left in the mead, it will try to ferment any residual sugar. The expected ABV of a yeast is a guideline, but they will routinely outperform if given half a chance. Leaving a mead until it is not actively fermenting is not enough - the yeast is merely hibernating until you feed it again. To backsweeten safely and avoid broken bottles/cleaning your ceiling there are a few proven methods. 1) You can sweeten at the table when you serve the mead. 2) You can add unfermentable sugars (e.g., lactose or xylitol) though you should keep in mind that these can have off flavors and/or cause adverse effects in some people. 3) You can stabilize the mead with K-meta and K-sorbate and add whatever sweetener you want afterwards. 4) You could filter the mead, but filtration is prohibitively expensive.
I fast age my meads by carbonating in corny kegs. Bubble co2 through the mead for even an hour and the fusels get bubbled out. I do this when I mess up and get low on mead. I also age in corny kegs.
I noticed a misstake, in game the bees at goldenglow have a lot of mountain flowers to make honey from, but the ones around honningbrew meadery would have a lot more lavander and tundra cotton to make it, this would make a big difference in taste. Honey isn't 'just honey'
@@orygarmy8560 yee 💕 thats what doomsday was sayin too We all agree goldenglow produces honey Doom was just mentioning that the honey the bees do produce in golden; they harvest from lavender flowers, mountain, ect 😄 Theres sooooooo many different kinds of honey irl! Hundreds! So just some overall honey probably wont BEE as special as bees that were in field's and field's of wildflowers💕 Anyway, SKYRIM FOR THE W!!!!! Hello fello dovahs if youre reading this! And fk Ancano!
Yknow like - in general never really thought about the fact that would impact mead, different honey from different flowers. Seems obvious in retrospect but 😅 (seriously anyone who hasnt, try some local different varieties of honey at some point)
Speaking from 5 years of brewing mead: I have yet to make 2 batches of mead with different honeys that noticeably tasted different. Granted, i make batches at 13+%ABV with Lavlin EC 1118(champagne yeast) and KV 1116 With my method, the flower nectar profiles from the honey get lost in fermentation. I would like to discover how to bring out those different flower nectar profiles however. I feel like I would need to use bread or ale yeast to preserve those profiles.
8:48 the little ʰᵒⁿᵉʸ got me. From my research (as a Norwegian, but not historian), any of the following would be historically appropriate to add to your mead, as we know vikings had access to them: Hops (very common), cinnamon, cloves, ginger, cardamom, blue*, elder, rasp, cloud, straw, goose and lingon berries, juniper and cherry, apples (another common one), yarrow, mint and nutmeg. *keep in mind that Norwegian blueberries come from a different plant than what you usually think of as blueberries in America
@@locoben400 We don't really have cloud berries here in the US because they aren't widely cultivated. If you live in a northern state you could potentially find them growing wild in a mountainous area.
@@locoben400 Cloudberry/nordic berry (rubus chamaemorus) or multe in Norwegian. People love picking them in the wild as a hobby, and it's seen as a thoughtful gift to share your spoils with friends and relatives.
@@perhapsyes2493 Kardemom is not the same as "kruidnagel" (nl) (cloves). It is close enough one could stand in for the other in a pinch, but they're not the same, and we Europeans wouldn't call cloves cardemom if we can help it 😉
@@DexterBelgium Oh wait, he was actually referring to cloves? Then I completely missed the context in the first comment, hah. Will probably delete cause it's just wrong. :) Was mostly just listening to the episode so I guessed it was because he was referring it to it in a weird way or something, like saying "Aluminum" somewhere in Europe.
A few notes from someone who's made mead before and researched it a lot: Normally (in modern times) you wouldn't ferment in a barrel. You ferment in glass carboys or plastic buckets and optionally age in or with some wood. It's just way more convenient. These barrels are a novelty I wouldn't ever bother with. We usually use wine yeasts, though kveik isn't a bad choice especially if you don't want to deal with trying to keep its temperature in a specific range (the kveik may have contributed to the citrusy notes Greg got). We also normally add some additional nutrients for the yeast. Honey doesn't contain much nitrogen and if the yeast don't have enough you can get off flavors. Lastly, it tends to get way better with age. Home brewing and mead and wine making is a deep rabbit hole. You can make so many things that aren't really available commercially.
You are correct! Those barrels are silly. We generally use wood chips or spirals in secondary. If anyone is interested in learning more about mead making head on over to Man Made Mead. He’s approaching 300 meads.
Tbf, I'm sure he's he's perfectly aware of this. This is a video about recreating skyrim drinks, not demonstrating the modern methods used for making mead. They probably used barrels in skyrim.
As someone whos been making mead/cider for a little bit now, its actually really nice to see the not-so-glamorous beginnings here. I think everyone whos ever tried their hands at homebrewing has fucked something up, or had some kind of problem. So its really nice to see the same happening here, especially for the people who might be wanting to start, so they wont get discouraged if its not seamless for them right away.
Could not agree more. My first batchs of cider and mead were complete disasters, with slight improvements every batch. I've been home brewing for about 18 months now, and I am just starting to see the fruits of my efforts.
A friend and I made mead for my 21st birthday (as in we started before 21 happened and drank on 21) and I think we ended up with something closer to moonshine, the shit was so strong and very cough syrupy. I'm tempted to try again 11 years later now but I'm running out of space in my house for these kinds of projects lmao.
Made my first mead because of Skyrim, and made the Juniper infused batch from Helgen as well. Turned out hot as dragon’s breath, almost 19%ABV. I have one bottle left from the original batch and I believe it’ll be 10 years old this year!!
I started brewing when I was 19. I got a little crazy with the yeast. Apparently the wine yeast I got was a beast that could occasionally get to 22%, and I was a heavy sugar pour Made an apple country wine that I drank on my 21st. Had to take it like shots it was so strong, even after aging for like a year at that point. Ended up pouring it back into the jug, adding more apple juice and 2 shots of fireball to the gallon until it was a gallon and a half, finally made it drinkable in regular portions.
The mead quest was part of the Thieves' Guild line. Maven Black-Briar, who is basically a mob boss, wants you to sabotage her competitor, Honningbrew, so she can enact a hostile takeover. You can't really choose a side without just... not continuing the quest line, but the guy who runs Honningbrew has basically enslaved his only employee, so they try to make you feel better about ending his career and getting him thrown in prison that way. Edit: As someone in the comments eluded to, there is also an insane wizard secretly living in a cave underneath the Honningbrew Meadery who is planning on destroying Whiterun with an army of mutated skeevers who you have to deal with during the sabotage.
I'd love to see an episode focusing on uncommon/weird bottles that are only used in a handful of drinks, and seeing if you could expand the use of them.
Greg the barrel is for secondary ferment. You make the Mead in a primary allow it to ferment, then siphon the Mead off of the settlement on the bottom then transfer it to the barrel. It will be clearer and probably taste alot better. You basic drank Mead with all the settlements mixed back in.
When I saw a lack of 5 gallon buckets, I knew he was going to drink the mud (Lees). How it came out as a positive review makes me think he was hiding the bad taste. My friends that got really into mead making let me try their mud/fruit mix leftover AFTER it settled a little (didn't really help) and it is not something someone should enjoy and is definitely not a representation of what the finished product could be. If done with experience, Lees can be nutty in wine, but if its just typical mead yeast then its pretty bad considering how the mead could/should taste.
@M _ definitely. It's not a big deal if you leave the Lee's in for a short period of time. But after awhile the Lee's will turn your mead. But over the years I have made mead I learned taking all the steps just makes your mead better.
Definitely my initial thought, too, as a long-time beer brewer. It'll clear up eventually, but moving the barrel a lot it was surely mixed in pretty well with the mead at that point. Secondary always (of course I got lazy over the years and just made my kegs the secondary, but the point still stands).
Safety note: If you backsweeten before bottling for storage, you may want to pasteurize your brews to make sure your bottles don't explode on the shelf!
if you don't pasteurise, you'll be adding carbondioxide to your mead, and it will turn fizzy like a beer, or if you add enough sugar etc. potentially blow your bottles
@@hunterwallace9551bentonite clay isn’t really a good way to kill yeast though. You can use bentonite in combination with a long cold crash to hopefully remove the yeast but still, there’s gonna be some alive in the sludge at the bottom. Personally I use bentonite, wine stabilizers, then a cold crash. Perfectly clear mead and no chance of blowing bottles. Either that or use erythritol. If you just want a bit of sweetness it tastes exactly the same as sugar and you don’t have to pasteurize at all. You can use it sweeten while easily carbonating a dry mead too. Add erythritol and your bottle priming sugar before bottling and you have easy sweet carbonated mead.
The Black-Briars are pretty explicitly not the good guys. However, we do work with them in the Thieves Guild and Dark Brotherhood quest-lines. The competition between the two Brewers you were thinking of was a Thieves Guild quest in which you poison a batch of Honningbrew mead so that the meadery closes and the Black-Briars can open another branch next to Whiterun.
You basically make Honningbrew Meadery fail a government health inspection through poisoning a visiting city guard captain to have the owner arrested and replaced with someone in the pocket of their direct competitor Granted had they hired someone legit to actually inspect the place they would've been shut down on account of rats and also a decrepit hobo commanding said rats right by the stills and cold storage
I feel obligated to cross-pollinate here and mention MisoHungrie, who's kinda made reviewing tie-in cookbooks his Thing. The Fallout one is by all accounts pretty solid. ETA: I misspelled his name. Shame on me, shame on my cow.
There's also a Honningbrew recipe you can find in game that's basically the same recipe as the quick mead but with cinnamon sticks and unsweetened Apple Juice instead of water and it's also quite good. It tastes a lot like an alcoholic version of American "apple cider" especially when warmed up. (Not to be confused with hard cider)
fun fact: A mead made with apple juice instead of water is called a cyser, and a mead made with wort (unfermented beer) instead of water is called a braggot.
The macaroni stick sorta makes sense as I have read stories about how there were stir sticks that were handed down from father to son to make mead. Since Vikings, and pretty much all cultures, had no idea what Yeast was, they learned what plants, fruits, flowers, etc would cause that fermentation. Hence the neat thing about Juniper berries. They can appear with a white coating, which is sort of considered to be wild yeast. Hence why you might hear the mention of Juniper berry and mead mentioned together often. Fun episode as always! Love to see more stuff like this!
I appreciate so much that he shook and rinsed rhe rest of the honey. I HATTTTEE when cooking shows don't scrape their bowls when they pour lmao it was like soothing my brain so see him use every drop of honey
Your advice to backsweeten the mead has a caveat: the addition of new sugar will kick fermentation back into gear, so if the mead is backsweetened and then bottled/kegged/stored airtight however else, you are at high risk of causing an explosion. A small addition of sugar is called bottle conditioning when it is used to cause enough fermentation to carbonate the drink. This is how almost all homebrewers and even some commercial breweries bottle carbonate. Backsweetening an airtight product that still has viable yeast is NEVER advised, and exploding bottles can cause huge messes, not to mention injury.
I had done this, inadvertently learning what "step feeding" was, and ended up with an unintentionally fairly high alcohol apple cyser 🤣It was delicious, but I had to make sure to warn folk before they had any.
question because i want to get into mead making, but would adding potassium sorbate before backsweetening stop the fermentation process and eliminate the explosion situation?
@@lazarabach4264 you could just heat it up gently to kill off the yeast. I dunno about the potassium sorbate method, but "cooking" your product is a very common way of stopping fermentation for sweet drinks.
@@lazarabach4264If you’re trying to make higher-proof stuff, another easy way to kill off yeast is to simply add more alcohol. Adding a neutral high-alcohol spirit (Everclear works great since it’s basically straight ethanol) and bringing the ABV up into the high teens will generally kill off all the little critters (exact threshold depends on the yeast you’re using), and then you can add/retain sugar without worrying about further fermentation. This is how port wine is made.
Not sure if someone else has mentioned but rosehips are essentially the fruiting body's of roses. They may taste similar to the flowers but they are a different thing with a distinct taste! I highly recommend messing about with homemade rosehip cordials/syrups to get a better idea of the flavour because its amazing!
I’m so proud of you Greg. Mead is one of the most magical things you can make. The relative ease compared to beer or wine is amazing, and it ages so beautifully. P.S. I would LOVE to see you make beer.
I don't know anything about making mead, I haven't even tried it myself IRL. But, I do know a LOT about Skyrim. The quest you were talking about in the video is part of the Thieves Guild questline. You team up with Maven Black-Briar (owner of Black-Briar Meadery) to put a competing meadery out of business (Honningbrew Meadery, owned by Sabjorn). To achieve this, you are to show up as a pest exterminator to remove Skeevers (Giant rats basically) from the meadery's basement and the tunnels they've created underneath. These tunnels lead to the boilery house where the mead is made. The clever part is that the owner of Honningbrew Meadery gives you the rat poison to exterminate the pests, in addition to dumping the poison into one of the brewing vats. The captain of the guard shows up to try a tasting of Honningbrew Mead and is poisoned as a result, which results in Sabjorn being arrested, and his assistant (whom is secretly aligned with Black-Briar Meadery) takes ownership, effectively putting Black-Briar Meadery's main competitor both out of business, and gaining Maven a new store to increase profits. Also, Skyrim is home to a lot of different landscapes and climates. It's not all just snowy wasteland. There's marshes, mountains, forests and plains. Each main city, and even their smaller villages and towns will have different ways of making mead and different ingredients that are available. Honningbrew uses lavender because there's a lot of lavender naturally growing in the area. Black-Briar does not use lavender because none grows in the area where it is produced. Even towns in the same region will have different tasting meads due to how the craft is taught, mostly from father to son, and so on. Recipes were likely rarely ever written down, and measurements for the ingredients were done by hand or by eye instead of using dedicated measuring tools. Sorry for the giant essay, but I thought I'd just mention those two things because I don't see anyone else here talking about it.
I would absolutely love an episode on cider making! One of my childhood favorite holiday drinks is a soft cider where you simmer it with cinnamon and an orange stuck full of cloves, and it would be really interesting to see how Greg approaches that as a hard cider
I made “mead” once, with a beer making kit I got one Christmas, instead of the included stuff in the kit, I used something called Michele’s Honey Creme syrup, and after 6 months, what it made was the best tasting drink ever.
I've been making mead for 14 years, and we actually use poland spring for brewing... it's not because it's special but rather it is consistent. Works great
Awesome! I have my second batch of mead aging now. One thing you should try next time is brewing in a simple plastic or glass container for the first few weeks and THEN siphoning to an aging vessel. That gets the mead off the dead yeast and tames some of the funk and reduces the cloudiness. The Compleat Meadmaker by Ken Schramm is a good resource. Very excited for more HTD home brewing content!
I would love to see some beer brewing episodes. I know there's a lot out there about brewing already but I would love to see some absolutely crazy beer ideas come to life, like a mojito beer or an aperol spritz beer.
Genus Brewing does really interesting (sometimes over the top) beer recipes. They're a commercial brewery/homebrew shop and AFAIK they usually serve the weird stuff they make in videos.
Love this episode, Mead is really easy to make and very good. One thing to remember is that if your mead tastes really harsh after fermentation don't worry it will mellow out drastically in the bottle as it ages. Many mead makers don't touch their mead until it has been in the bottle for 6 months or a year. Also any mead you have had that is sweet is probably backsweetened. You could add extra honey on the front end, but its easier and more exact to add it after fermentation is done. Last thing is to not worry too much about your fermentation, mead tends to be pretty forgiving about most things and is pretty hard to mess up.
25:19 I immediately stopped what I was doing and yelled "NO WAIT!" and went back to check. @How To Drink actually just ate rose hips. PSA to everyone else, don't eat whole rose hips. There's little hairs inside the fruit that will irritate your bowels as they pass through.
A HTD series where you go into different alcohol making methods would be interesting! Maybe make cocktails and recipes using the booze you make, see how they compare to one's made with commercially available alcohol
I picked up the cookbook a few years ago and fell in love with making mead because of it. recently tried a year aged blackbriar and definitely suggest halving the clove. Juniper was by far my family and I's favorite!
I'd love to see you make beers and wines occasionally. I think it would have to be something interesting though, like an apricot wine or cranberry wine, or a heather and gorse beer. Anything that would add to the knowledge of beer and wine without being a repeat that's been done thousands of times.
If you'd like to try your hand at making mead, in addition to what Greg does here, there's a recipe that's been floating around on the internet for years called Joe's Ancient Orange Mead. You do need a couple of specialized things to ferment and bottle it, but it can be made entirely with ingredients from your grocery store. Though it makes a sweeter mead rather than a dry one. It's been a while since I've made any, but it was tasty enough that I after the first gallon-sized batch, I went back and made a five gallon batch. (Also, I've had a fermentation go wrong with a raspberry imperial stout after I bottled it. Let's just say that the term for that is 'bottle bombs' and let you imagine the horrific mess that made.)
@@markstaud Getting busted during room inspections maybe? ;D JAOM is actually really accessible and a nice intro into mead with flavors we tend to like, since plain mead has a flavor most of us aren't familiar with today. It's not bad, IMO, but like many alcoholic beverages you kinda have to train your palette to understand it.
If you continue to homebrew, I recommend waiting for your sample to cool down before taking the specific gravity measurement. Or atleast record the temp for more accurate results. You have all the equipment to get fairly clean mead, you just gotta rack it atleast once after primary. You can leave everything in primary when it comes to beer but because wines take longer to age you gotta rack em off the sediment for a cleaner flavor profile
I would love to see you do more brewing! Please do that. Personally, I would like to see a farmhouse ale style and experimentation with different beer styles. It would also be cool to see you collaborate with the folks at Whiskey Tribe and try your hand at distilling. Maybe even a Rum?
@@mikeshomestead9411 It was asked up front in this episode when showing the new machine: "Would you like to see How To Drink do some brewing? Let me know!" Why be like this?
You can make vinegar out of just about any alcohol you ferment, including mead! Might not be on-brand for the channel, but it's really cool to try (and can have incredible results!)
@@XDrSinusX I actually happened upon a place yesterday that sells really nice vinegars; I was thinking of picking up either a fig or raspberry vin cotto
I've been homebrewing beer for a decade now, and I've accidentally made vinegar a handful of times, thanks to failing at sanitizing or old equipment that needed replacing. Unfortunately, I never had need for 23L of vinegar, so it always winds up down the drain when that happens.
I heartily recommend trying to make a bochet if you're interested in having another go at it! Essentially you caramelize the honey in a big pot for a couple hours (making your house smell delicious) before turning it into mead, has a darker, more complex, toffee sort of flavor, and it's still probably easier to make than any beer. Skål!
This is a fantastic video. I love the high production quality, the down to earth host, and the crew getting in on the action too. This is a great show, and man... I've been playing skyrim again and once again. I've got a hankering for mead. Gotta try this out sometime! Thank you for the fantastic content! You've earned a sub!
I've been a home brewer since the mid 90's. Its a great hobby - part art, part science, and all kinds of room for experimentation. I've also done mead and cider. I heartily support an endeavors into zymurgy Greg!
Great to see mead being brought into the lime light again. To help with the funky flavor try using fermaid O for yeast nutrient and if you plan on back sweetening below the abv tolerance of your yeast use stabilizers first so the batch doesn’t referment. Food grade buckets will make life much easier before oaking too. Hope you continue your brewing adventures!
The frickin cardimum/clove gag during the blackbriar tasting was hilarious. It never stopped being funny, I could pratically hear the outrage while editing. I can't wait to make my own mead!! I'd be interested in a HTD video on your own mead recipe, eventually
My dad and I tried making these a couple of years ago, and they turned out pretty great (give or take a batch or two)! Highly recommended (especially the Honningbrew mead, it's considered the best in-game for a reason) as something to quaff with others. Good stuff as always!
Yes! This makes me so happy! So glad you made this. I always make the lavender bread for events, and I really want to start making mead to go with it, so this is so helpful
There are loads of brewtube channels that are pretty well dedicated to making mead. Mead is surprisingly simple to make. Be warned, once you start, you will be hooked on the process.
Would love to see some recipes for Morrowind beer and liquor if you go more this direction. Mazte (Saltrice beer) Sujamma (No clue what sujamma is). And of course you can just do a ton of Skooma.
Mazte is basically sake. Saltrice is a salt-water rice-like grain containing caffeine. Basically 4loko rice wine. Flin is just Cyrodiil whiskey. Nothing fantasical here, just some top shelf whiskey. However, it IS a whiskey, which implies Nirn has barley... this is important for Sujamma. Sujamma, Shein, and Greef are all based on the comberry. Comberries are interesting as they are described as red berries that are bitter the warmer the climate they grow in is. That makes me think the closest we're getting to comberries is Muscadine grapes, which grow sweeter the colder the climate. That makes Shein a Muscadine grape wine. Greef is comberry brandy... so a Muscadine grape brandy. And Sujamma is the outlier. It is described in basically every game multiple times as "extremely potent", described in Morrowind as brewed using comberries and local grain, and _only_ _once_ in ESO said to be a mix of comberry, lemon, and barley. So my guess for Sujamma is a moonshine or grain whiskey flavored with Muscadine grapes and a hint of citrus.
Heck, if you really want to get crazy... Bosmer have jagga, which is fermented pig milk and honey. Or their rotmeth, which is alcohol made from the liquid from rancid meat purified with spices. They also have Sun Dusk Ale, which is rotmeth ale described as smelling like a "juicy steak marinated in a plum wine with coriander". On a lighter note the argonians of Black Marsh have ale, which is easy to do. And theilul, which is fermented cane sugar. They also have something based on Hist Sap, but other than a single passing reference in Oblivion this sap drink is never mentioned again. Hammerfell has rum. Heck, Skyrim has a fetch quest to steal some imported redguard rum. Skyrim also has Aalto wine made from jazbay grapes.. which look and are described as tasting a lot like sloe berries. So a sloe berry wine.
I always thought that skooma was just liquid catnip becuase the kahjeet loved it, at least until the dawnguard dlc quest where you go into a skooma den that is run by vampires, then I started thinking skooma is some kind of drug like heroin
My wife and I have been making wine, beer, and melomels for a few years so I didn’t learn much about the whole process. I’m still watching this from start to finish just because I enjoy watching your team and you explain things. Great video. I’d like to see how to drink tackle more fermented beverages. I think it’s safe to say there’s a healthy crossover between home craft mixologists and home brewers/winemakers/meadmakers. With your flair for incorporating pop culture into your drinks, there’s a lot of potential content to explore in pop culture themed fermented beverages. And it opens up doors for home fortified wine. I am absolutely confident that you could make some rocking home fortified wines, and I’m very interested in copying whatever you come up with.
This episode was awesome, great work as always Greg! I’d love to see HTD delve into the world of home brewing, there’s so much room for creativity and expression in that world and you’re already a creative guy so I’d love to see what you can do. As someone who has to be gluten free I would definitely love to see you do some ciders like you were talking about in this video. Either way, thanks for the content :)
I brew my own mead too, on a very small scale and one step I feel you really missed was de-floccing your mead after about 1 month (for sweet mead) or at most 2 by dropping in some bentonite clay, waiting a day or two and then racking (transferring) your newly clear and not cloudy mead into it's smaller final contaners to age properly for another month or two. Then you will have a brighter, clear and clean mead that will taste more of the honey as well making it taste closer to a German dessert wine then a dry wine. ( would also suggest primary fermentation be done in a glass carboy but that's up to you.)
Yeah, I used to work in a winery, and racking the wine after secondary fermentation was essential. Not only is that dead yeast sludge fairly disgusting, but the slurry of organic matter is also a breeding ground for all kinds of microorganisms that can majorly affect the quality of the final product. And yes, there are plenty of microorganisms that can live and thrive in alcoholic environments.
I loved Cornholio. I remember visiting the Alamo when I was like 17. My grandparents are from Mexico/Texas so they speak Spanish. During the visit I was just repeating lines from Beavis. I swore he said "tienes tus papeles" in one episodes. I don't speak Spanish but I said that and made my grandma and grandpa laugh. Grandma asks, "do you know what that means?" Me: "no...?" Grandma: "you asked if I have my papers. Be careful who you say that around!". We all died laughing for while but I stopped repeating that line for the duration of our visit in Texas haha
I am currently in the process of opening a meadery, I personally love the mead making venture. I would definitely watch more of this type of content, at least that is my vote!
Nicely done! Our first adventure in mead-making was actually cyser: a hard cider made with honey, or mead made with apple juice, if you prefer. It packs a wollop and it usually self-carbonates from the excess fructose in the apple juice.
The editing on this episode is incredible. Edit: I just noticed a single frame where the "weeks/months later" graphic gets mixed up. This isn't a criticism and doesn't change my opinion that this video's editing is awesome. I just found it funny I noticed it right after commenting this.
It's fantastic to see you try new things and you're going to learn so much about brewing and what's important in it. Looking forward to more brewing stuff (and less things like shaking a fermented product in open air, heating honey, etc. These things are not wrong, but generally frowned upon lol)! Very cool episode
I'm having an old fashioned, ( they way he makes it ) and laughing my head off, cause this was by far...the best episode. All the effects and such just made it soo entertaining
I'm a big fan of dryer meads, they're delicious. It was a huge (very pleasant) surprise the first time I ran into one since up until that point I'd only ever really had really sweet Chaucer's spiced mead around the holidays.
I bought the official Skyrim cookbook about five years ago and I've been making mead ever since. I have a 2 litre bottle of Nord Mead that has been aging since June of 2020. It's *_delectable._*
Not the "chai tea" 🥲 Lol @ the cardamon repeating, we all have our moments. I would love to see more brewing episodes - mead, beer, wine, et cetera! I've been wanting to get into brewing before I was even "of-age" to drink, so I'll definitely watch those episodes. Doesn't even have to be alcoholic, I know cola syrups and such have been made with just saucepans and whatever in the past, but there are so many drinks that can be made with the process, I'd be interested to see what you can come up with!
You are supposed to prep your barrel by filling it with water and letting it soak for a few days so that it swells and seals. This also reduces 'angels share'. The reason those are leaking is they are not lacquered.
I don't know if this may be something lost in translated, but barrels should absolutely not be lacquered? Lacquer would stop the flavouring from the wood. But on the topic of letting the barrels swell - a 100%, not doing it is just a waste.
@@mvicksdog I could imagine so. But looking at these barrels they may not exactly be the prime candidates. Hard to tell of course, but they're definitely not weathered in any capacity.
He probably won’t be making liquor as it’s illegal. He may make it, but almost definitely not on camera (unless of course he gets a license and all that, but I just don’t see him doing it)
Filming the mead making process is a lot of work and waiting, very commendable! Long time fan of the channel, this was great fun to watch as mead makers. Yeast selection is definitely the most variable and can change a recipe completely. Thanks for spreading the word about mead!
This is one of the more interesting videos I've watched. In general, not just your channel. I use to home brew beer back before the days of the NutriChef and other fancy gear. As microbrewery beer became available in the US it became easier just to buy the beer. I have looked into making mead and I think I even have a book somewhere. If I was a lot younger I would get one of those Nutrichefs and take it up as a hobby. As a retired Chemical Engineer we like this stuff. One tip I would add for cutting-up the fruit is to use a vegetable mandoline or chopper. I'm not a big fan of cutting things into tiny pieces with a knife.
@@ketra1504 It's an interesting hobby with a lot of resources: books, magazines (Zymurgy), conventions etc... with tips and recipes. I just had a large pot, a carboy, bottling equipment, and some gadgets such as airlocks, etc. Nowadays a lot of specialized equipment is available for a price. Of course if you really enjoy the hobby the equipment can be worth it for making things easier, with perhaps better results. The various ingredients are in general readily available and not that expensive. Stuff like malted barley and other grains, hops, yeast, etc.. One thing is that you end-up with a lot of beer, usually batches are about 5 gallons. As you brew good beer and ales your friends will probably be glad to help get rid of the beer. Perhaps with modern equipment you can make smaller batches. Anyway, have fun with the hobby if you take the plunge, and the mantra for the hobby is: "Relax, Don't Worry, Have a Homebrew".
Hi fellow ChemEs! (30-something here) No shock that we're common in the hobby lol. I haven't made beer for a few years but have gotten back into brewing because my wife and I love cider so much and in my opinion it's a GREAT way to start brewing. Simple and rewarding if you like it and want to experiment with flavors like in this episode.
You touched on the various yeasts, one thing that surprised me was just how each type brought its own flavours. Bread yeast was the most interesting. Straight off ferment it tasted like jet fuel mixed with cat piss, but after 2 years of bottle ageing, it's one of my favourites.
I'd really love to see you compare different at-home beer brewing kits. I've got one that has a fancy glass bottle and the mash and everythin' included and it seems more substantial than the ol' Mr. Beer. But I'd love to hear your thoughts on the different flavors or qualities with yer skilled buds. :) Always happy to see mead! Excellent stuff man
My Norwegian grandparents made a lot of their own Meads . They were born in the early 1900s . You can make mead out if almost anything . It is cheap and easy. I remember they'd have 6-10 Carboys going at all times. They were also alcoholics
I believe you are to ferment in a different container then transfer to the park Barrel for the woods notes so that you don’t drink the spent yeast which I understand can impart odd flavors. Just a thought. Very entertaining video! I’ll be watching more
I did this before with gallon jugs of water from the store instead of fancy barrels, here's some tips: - Try champaign yeast, you can get even higher avb if you want, fit more honey into the same volume of water. - Grow the ginger root in a pot over the spring & summer, harvest the fronds & hang dry them for next batch. Ginger leaf is a secret herb that is similar to root but notably different. If you have a long enough growing season it might flower. - Seeds can make it bitter (prob cyanide), if you have a lot, or break or cut the seeds, it will be more bitter than just loose seeds. Imo grow the seeds as houseplants. - Boil the honey until it turns *black* and smells like your roommates will be enraged. Then rinse it into your fermenter. Sounds insane, is actually good. Avoid killing yourself! if it splashes on someone they will surely die irl & you don't have innate fire resist, outlander. - citrus peels / oleo saccharum works -- oleoresins work (try putting in frankincense & myrrh, it'll be fine as long as you don't put too much, it will be very bitter and change the texture a lot) - weird additions of different spices & herbs can give really unexpected interesting results
Bochet (caramelized honey mead) is as you said - can be dangerous - prospective bochet makers should be mindful when quenching (do it outside) as the honey gets to Candy/Caramel-Temps (320F/160C+) which will instantly boil any the water it first comes in contact with - resulting the afore mentioned splashing of said very hot honey-caramel. Also note it will greatly increase in volume as it 'foams' in the heating process. That said - It is tasty if you don't mess it up like I have in the past. I've had to literally chisel dried honey-caramel off my floor.
@@uncledrax it's true. What I did was use the biggest pot I had, cut the heat and wait for it to cool, but while it was still warm start rinsing it out of the pot into the fermentation vessel with the water it will ferment in. A small batch + big pot + some patience kept me from losing my face & made clean up way easier than I expected. Timing it so it's warm & easy to dissolve but not so hot that it could explode is pretty critical if you decide to try it -- low & slow, imo. Water should be room temp or hot. Still cooked the honey to the point where it smelled like I ruined it, but it turned out great. No burned particles, but the honey was very, very caramelized. E: slowly rinse it out in stages if your entire batch's volume is too big to fit into the pot at once. If you get candy glass fused into the pot somehow gently rewarm it with water so it dissolves cleanly. Make sure to stir at all times while the heat is on.
The range in honey is probably for your preference. You can get more dry or sweet mead depending on your honey, the amount of honey, and the yeast you use. My first mead was just a basic honey and water with a wine yeast I don't remember at the moment what yeast it was but it's like the most common basic wine yeast you can get came out super good. I added more honey than I needed to, think it was 4 lbs but it came out strong and sweet and really easy to drink. Best thing I ever did.
@How to Drink, now that all 3 anniversary drinks for Assassin's Creed have released, can you do a video tasting and making cocktails with them. Thank you and I love your videos.
Next time backsweeten just a smidge. Just be sure to add potassium sorbate/metabisulfate before backsweetening. I like a very dry mead but it doesn't have a lot of honey flavor. the solution is to simply put honey in (sweetening it)
I probably would've gone glass carboys for your first mead (as much as the wood would help change the flavour, but that can be added to them too). Easier to work with and reusable.
@@Antaios632 If it is "quick", sure. I don't personally trust plastics for when the contents are going to stay in there a while. It likes to leech flavours from what I've seen/heard...
@@derickwiebe yeah, I'm talking about the initial fermentation. I rack off into glass bottles after that. You really shouldn't have a problem with off-flavors as long as you're using food-grade plastics intended for brewing. So, like, using a 5 gallon bucket from Home Depot, all bets are off. 😂
@@1Seanmb Skooma is also described as thick and syrup-like that can be drank or heated up and cooked into vapor for a skooma pipe. Skooma is also supposedly extremely addictive. One use and you're craving it for life.
I made just a honey-water mead once. First time anything like that. I used a honey from our farm. Fermentation took a little extra time. But what I had was the most delicious honey-lemon-grass drink I've ever had lol. Also the first time I tried a mead. It's so easy to do it I can't recommend enough. You really don't need wood barrels though I am sure you can add in some neat flavors. Those tiny barrels are pretty darn cute though.
OMG, THANK YOU. I've been trying to figure out how to use the hydrometer for my home made wine because I don't add yeast, I use berries from my garden which already have yeast in them, and the people at the beer brewing store were not very helpful. So my wine has always had some unknown amount of alcohol in it. And now I can actually measure it!
as someone thats only made mead 3 times right now, after about 2 or 3 weeks into the fermentation you want to check how dry it is and if fermentation has finished you want to pour off the liquid, leaving behind the yeast and let that age instead. after a few months it gets more clear
Do a video on making homemeade Amaro and other complex herbal liquers! I made a batch of Aquavit this christmas to give out and most people loved it! (everyone who didn't love it hated it, a very marmite situation)
I can say, doing an episode on brewing beer might be a good idea bcs that's a popular topic and also you're a trustworthy source of information for recipes (I didn't give lime/lemon superjuice a try until I asked you on Twitter about it and you told me it was good)
oh this was fascinating! So many of my confused and distant memories of my dad trying to homebrew things make more sense now. I really would love to see some beermaking, and cidering.
Back when I used to brew a lot of beer, I bottled with a little too much priming sugar. I was awakened in the middle of the night to the sound of 24 carefully crimped bottle caps hitting the ceiling and 24 individual ale volcanoes. Once the excess CO2 blew off, it had pretty much done its thing, so I consolidated the bottles, recapped them, and named it artillery ale. It was pretty good.
Hearing about the airlock reminded me of a story passed down. Great grampa used to ferment his own cream soda and rootbeer. One summer himself and great gramma went on vacation while there was a forgotten batch in the basement. They were quite well sealed in glass… I’m not sure what the big vessels would be called… no airlocks. They came home from Mexico, to a really nasty sticky and tank basement… and great grampa had to find a new hobby XD
*Stop telling me to soak my barrels. We soaked these for a full month before using them- I am not exaggerating. They leaked anyway.*
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Dude I was looking up a recipe for my dnd campaign and you just posted the exact recipe. I owe you bro fr
Give us a HTD on making beer that would be awesome !
There is a company who makes Skooma themed absinthe...definitely need to see that on the show
I used to be a brewer until I took an arrowroot to the mead.
I do! Do the rest of the drinks next time! XD
"You're kidding yourself if you think you have data. All you have is noise." is an all-time HTD quote.
^^^this. That quote was something I wish I could impress on SOOOO many people
100% agree
Cyberpunk Greg after destroying a bunch of servers that were collecting personal data
I used to work at a brewery/meadery/winery/distillery, and we used to be suuuuuper specific with everything but that was commercial and whatnot.
Then when home brewing that kind of went waaaaay down😂
First truth of engineering, that. Wish so many more people knew about that.
Blackbriar mead, in a cut quest that's still in the game files, had salt as a secret ingredient! The purpose was supposedly that the customer drank the mead, unknowingly got more thirsty and drank more mead until being so drunk they'd not notice their thirst. It was all some sneaky way for the criminal Blackbriar family to sell more mead.
I always imagine that blackbriar mead must not taste great. Simply because I totally believe the Blackbriars would cut it with fillers to just get more volume out of brews.
Quantity over quality just like McDonald's lol
This does not surprise me
Ah, the old speakeasy method
And the blue one
As someone who's made mead several times, I can tell you that they taste best after being aged a year. Yes, they're drinkable after 3-4 months, but I beg you to let them sit just a bit longer. It's unreal how much the taste refines and improves. Also, use a wine yeast - Lalvin 71b is my favorite. It can take the ABV up like 14% if the conditions are right! Ale yeasts won't really take it beyond 6-7%. Once made a blueberry mead that was delicious AND gave you a noticeable buzz after just 1 glass.
The exception to this is short mead/hydromels, though that's obviously not what's being made here. There is some evidence that historic meads were brewed to a lower ABV and were served younger with some carbonation. Modern meads are made with carefully selected yeast strains and better sanitation/techniques, so we can brew reliably stronger meads and age them without ill effect.
do you also back sweeten the mead?
@@Pseud0nymTXT A lot of people backsweeten to taste, though I prefer a drier finish on most of mine. First, if you're bottling and carbonating your mead, you need to make sure to use a bottle that can handle the pressure. Beer bottles are generally fine, but you need to be more selective if you use wine bottles. Champagne bottles use thicker glass and more secure corks when compared to a bordeaux bottle. If you have any yeast left in the mead, it will try to ferment any residual sugar. The expected ABV of a yeast is a guideline, but they will routinely outperform if given half a chance. Leaving a mead until it is not actively fermenting is not enough - the yeast is merely hibernating until you feed it again.
To backsweeten safely and avoid broken bottles/cleaning your ceiling there are a few proven methods. 1) You can sweeten at the table when you serve the mead. 2) You can add unfermentable sugars (e.g., lactose or xylitol) though you should keep in mind that these can have off flavors and/or cause adverse effects in some people. 3) You can stabilize the mead with K-meta and K-sorbate and add whatever sweetener you want afterwards. 4) You could filter the mead, but filtration is prohibitively expensive.
I fast age my meads by carbonating in corny kegs. Bubble co2 through the mead for even an hour and the fusels get bubbled out. I do this when I mess up and get low on mead. I also age in corny kegs.
@@Pseud0nymTXT Yep, I'll back sweeten if needed.
I noticed a misstake, in game the bees at goldenglow have a lot of mountain flowers to make honey from, but the ones around honningbrew meadery would have a lot more lavander and tundra cotton to make it, this would make a big difference in taste. Honey isn't 'just honey'
I see where ya comin from, but i dont think he remembers much from the game sadly
Golden glow never made mead they only produced honey and supplied honningbrew and blackbriar so the honey is the same
@@orygarmy8560 yee 💕 thats what doomsday was sayin too
We all agree goldenglow produces honey
Doom was just mentioning that the honey the bees do produce in golden; they harvest from lavender flowers, mountain, ect 😄
Theres sooooooo many different kinds of honey irl! Hundreds! So just some overall honey probably wont BEE as special as bees that were in field's and field's of wildflowers💕
Anyway, SKYRIM FOR THE W!!!!!
Hello fello dovahs if youre reading this! And fk Ancano!
Yknow like - in general never really thought about the fact that would impact mead, different honey from different flowers.
Seems obvious in retrospect but 😅
(seriously anyone who hasnt, try some local different varieties of honey at some point)
Speaking from 5 years of brewing mead: I have yet to make 2 batches of mead with different honeys that noticeably tasted different. Granted, i make batches at 13+%ABV with Lavlin EC 1118(champagne yeast) and KV 1116
With my method, the flower nectar profiles from the honey get lost in fermentation. I would like to discover how to bring out those different flower nectar profiles however. I feel like I would need to use bread or ale yeast to preserve those profiles.
8:48 the little ʰᵒⁿᵉʸ got me. From my research (as a Norwegian, but not historian), any of the following would be historically appropriate to add to your mead, as we know vikings had access to them: Hops (very common), cinnamon, cloves, ginger, cardamom, blue*, elder, rasp, cloud, straw, goose and lingon berries, juniper and cherry, apples (another common one), yarrow, mint and nutmeg. *keep in mind that Norwegian blueberries come from a different plant than what you usually think of as blueberries in America
I think Americans call our blueberries billberries!
@@artonion420 Cheers!
What's cloud?
@@locoben400 We don't really have cloud berries here in the US because they aren't widely cultivated. If you live in a northern state you could potentially find them growing wild in a mountainous area.
@@locoben400 Cloudberry/nordic berry (rubus chamaemorus) or multe in Norwegian. People love picking them in the wild as a hobby, and it's seen as a thoughtful gift to share your spoils with friends and relatives.
I'm obsessed with Greg discussing the "cardamom" so extensively that it just could not be edited around. I guffawed every time the captions read him.
Edit- was wrong;
It's not so weird, a big part of Europe calls it that. Kardemom (NL), Kardamom (DE), Cardamome (FR), Cardamomo (PT)
@@perhapsyes2493 Kardemom is not the same as "kruidnagel" (nl) (cloves). It is close enough one could stand in for the other in a pinch, but they're not the same, and we Europeans wouldn't call cloves cardemom if we can help it 😉
@@DexterBelgium Oh wait, he was actually referring to cloves? Then I completely missed the context in the first comment, hah. Will probably delete cause it's just wrong. :)
Was mostly just listening to the episode so I guessed it was because he was referring it to it in a weird way or something, like saying "Aluminum" somewhere in Europe.
I'm laughing my ass off
@@perhapsyes2493 oh he is saying it weird, he’s just _also_ wrong
As someone who has over 2600 hours in Skyrim, and makes mead on the side. I’ve never clicked on a video faster
Only 2600 hours?
Brooo same !
@abcdefghijk123456100 this ain't a competition 😂
I also made mead, oh boy it gets sour quick. I let it age for like 6 months and oof dah don't do that.
Were you disappointed? Strange not to rack a mead, and drink it with the dead yeast (lees) in it
A few notes from someone who's made mead before and researched it a lot:
Normally (in modern times) you wouldn't ferment in a barrel. You ferment in glass carboys or plastic buckets and optionally age in or with some wood. It's just way more convenient. These barrels are a novelty I wouldn't ever bother with. We usually use wine yeasts, though kveik isn't a bad choice especially if you don't want to deal with trying to keep its temperature in a specific range (the kveik may have contributed to the citrusy notes Greg got). We also normally add some additional nutrients for the yeast. Honey doesn't contain much nitrogen and if the yeast don't have enough you can get off flavors. Lastly, it tends to get way better with age.
Home brewing and mead and wine making is a deep rabbit hole. You can make so many things that aren't really available commercially.
I think they were trying to copy the old ways, who know how they really did it.
You are correct! Those barrels are silly. We generally use wood chips or spirals in secondary. If anyone is interested in learning more about mead making head on over to Man Made Mead. He’s approaching 300 meads.
Sooo when you gonna start making videos so we can follow along 😂
@@dkrol997 Plenty of content on RUclips on this subject!
Tbf, I'm sure he's he's perfectly aware of this. This is a video about recreating skyrim drinks, not demonstrating the modern methods used for making mead. They probably used barrels in skyrim.
As someone whos been making mead/cider for a little bit now, its actually really nice to see the not-so-glamorous beginnings here. I think everyone whos ever tried their hands at homebrewing has fucked something up, or had some kind of problem. So its really nice to see the same happening here, especially for the people who might be wanting to start, so they wont get discouraged if its not seamless for them right away.
Could not agree more. My first batchs of cider and mead were complete disasters, with slight improvements every batch. I've been home brewing for about 18 months now, and I am just starting to see the fruits of my efforts.
My first batch got forgotten for a year. It was…strong. Like grain alcohol strong.
My first batch of a pear "wine"... Yikes is enough. Lessons learned 😂
It's a true art that takes years to perfect
A friend and I made mead for my 21st birthday (as in we started before 21 happened and drank on 21) and I think we ended up with something closer to moonshine, the shit was so strong and very cough syrupy. I'm tempted to try again 11 years later now but I'm running out of space in my house for these kinds of projects lmao.
Made my first mead because of Skyrim, and made the Juniper infused batch from Helgen as well. Turned out hot as dragon’s breath, almost 19%ABV. I have one bottle left from the original batch and I believe it’ll be 10 years old this year!!
I started brewing when I was 19. I got a little crazy with the yeast.
Apparently the wine yeast I got was a beast that could occasionally get to 22%, and I was a heavy sugar pour
Made an apple country wine that I drank on my 21st. Had to take it like shots it was so strong, even after aging for like a year at that point. Ended up pouring it back into the jug, adding more apple juice and 2 shots of fireball to the gallon until it was a gallon and a half, finally made it drinkable in regular portions.
Can I have it?
The mead quest was part of the Thieves' Guild line. Maven Black-Briar, who is basically a mob boss, wants you to sabotage her competitor, Honningbrew, so she can enact a hostile takeover.
You can't really choose a side without just... not continuing the quest line, but the guy who runs Honningbrew has basically enslaved his only employee, so they try to make you feel better about ending his career and getting him thrown in prison that way.
Edit: As someone in the comments eluded to, there is also an insane wizard secretly living in a cave underneath the Honningbrew Meadery who is planning on destroying Whiterun with an army of mutated skeevers who you have to deal with during the sabotage.
I have never done the Thieves Guild Questline in my countless playthroughs of Skyrim. I absolutely refuse to ever do it!
@@morrigankasa570 you’re missing one of the best quest lines in the game
Let's not forget the skeever issue also
@@JarlAmbition Not to me, same for Oblivion. I don't like Pickpocketing or Thievery things!
Though with the power of mods, it is possible to stick it to Maven and keep Honningbrew in business.
I'd love to see an episode focusing on uncommon/weird bottles that are only used in a handful of drinks, and seeing if you could expand the use of them.
Greg the barrel is for secondary ferment. You make the Mead in a primary allow it to ferment, then siphon the Mead off of the settlement on the bottom then transfer it to the barrel. It will be clearer and probably taste alot better. You basic drank Mead with all the settlements mixed back in.
When I saw a lack of 5 gallon buckets, I knew he was going to drink the mud (Lees). How it came out as a positive review makes me think he was hiding the bad taste. My friends that got really into mead making let me try their mud/fruit mix leftover AFTER it settled a little (didn't really help) and it is not something someone should enjoy and is definitely not a representation of what the finished product could be. If done with experience, Lees can be nutty in wine, but if its just typical mead yeast then its pretty bad considering how the mead could/should taste.
Bingo. I was going to say the same thing. They were drinking off the yeast cake from that barrel..lol
@@AlbeeSoaring for sure I was smacking my forehead! I did the same thing my first time. But putting in that extra effort really makes a difference.
@M _ definitely. It's not a big deal if you leave the Lee's in for a short period of time. But after awhile the Lee's will turn your mead. But over the years I have made mead I learned taking all the steps just makes your mead better.
Definitely my initial thought, too, as a long-time beer brewer. It'll clear up eventually, but moving the barrel a lot it was surely mixed in pretty well with the mead at that point. Secondary always (of course I got lazy over the years and just made my kegs the secondary, but the point still stands).
I'd love to see your interpretations of the beers from Deep Rock Galactic. They have a pretty wide range of stuff.
Safety note: If you backsweeten before bottling for storage, you may want to pasteurize your brews to make sure your bottles don't explode on the shelf!
if you don't pasteurise, you'll be adding carbondioxide to your mead, and it will turn fizzy like a beer, or if you add enough sugar etc. potentially blow your bottles
You can also add bentonite clay or a stabilizer to kill the yeast so you can backsweeten safley
@@hunterwallace9551bentonite clay isn’t really a good way to kill yeast though. You can use bentonite in combination with a long cold crash to hopefully remove the yeast but still, there’s gonna be some alive in the sludge at the bottom.
Personally I use bentonite, wine stabilizers, then a cold crash. Perfectly clear mead and no chance of blowing bottles.
Either that or use erythritol. If you just want a bit of sweetness it tastes exactly the same as sugar and you don’t have to pasteurize at all. You can use it sweeten while easily carbonating a dry mead too. Add erythritol and your bottle priming sugar before bottling and you have easy sweet carbonated mead.
The Black-Briars are pretty explicitly not the good guys. However, we do work with them in the Thieves Guild and Dark Brotherhood quest-lines. The competition between the two Brewers you were thinking of was a Thieves Guild quest in which you poison a batch of Honningbrew mead so that the meadery closes and the Black-Briars can open another branch next to Whiterun.
You basically make Honningbrew Meadery fail a government health inspection through poisoning a visiting city guard captain to have the owner arrested and replaced with someone in the pocket of their direct competitor
Granted had they hired someone legit to actually inspect the place they would've been shut down on account of rats and also a decrepit hobo commanding said rats right by the stills and cold storage
The fallout cookbook has a lot of cocktail recipes and nuka cola recipes. They would be cool to make for an episode.
He already has an episode on nuka cola variants, check it out
Yeah and he made sasperial, not sure how to spell that, root beer from fallout as well
...Fallout cookbook? How did I not know this existed? Shit, I'm off to Google.
I feel obligated to cross-pollinate here and mention MisoHungrie, who's kinda made reviewing tie-in cookbooks his Thing. The Fallout one is by all accounts pretty solid.
ETA: I misspelled his name. Shame on me, shame on my cow.
There's also a Honningbrew recipe you can find in game that's basically the same recipe as the quick mead but with cinnamon sticks and unsweetened Apple Juice instead of water and it's also quite good.
It tastes a lot like an alcoholic version of American "apple cider" especially when warmed up. (Not to be confused with hard cider)
fun fact: A mead made with apple juice instead of water is called a cyser, and a mead made with wort (unfermented beer) instead of water is called a braggot.
The macaroni stick sorta makes sense as I have read stories about how there were stir sticks that were handed down from father to son to make mead. Since Vikings, and pretty much all cultures, had no idea what Yeast was, they learned what plants, fruits, flowers, etc would cause that fermentation. Hence the neat thing about Juniper berries. They can appear with a white coating, which is sort of considered to be wild yeast. Hence why you might hear the mention of Juniper berry and mead mentioned together often. Fun episode as always! Love to see more stuff like this!
I appreciate so much that he shook and rinsed rhe rest of the honey. I HATTTTEE when cooking shows don't scrape their bowls when they pour lmao it was like soothing my brain so see him use every drop of honey
Your advice to backsweeten the mead has a caveat: the addition of new sugar will kick fermentation back into gear, so if the mead is backsweetened and then bottled/kegged/stored airtight however else, you are at high risk of causing an explosion. A small addition of sugar is called bottle conditioning when it is used to cause enough fermentation to carbonate the drink. This is how almost all homebrewers and even some commercial breweries bottle carbonate.
Backsweetening an airtight product that still has viable yeast is NEVER advised, and exploding bottles can cause huge messes, not to mention injury.
I had done this, inadvertently learning what "step feeding" was, and ended up with an unintentionally fairly high alcohol apple cyser 🤣It was delicious, but I had to make sure to warn folk before they had any.
question because i want to get into mead making, but would adding potassium sorbate before backsweetening stop the fermentation process and eliminate the explosion situation?
@@lazarabach4264 you could just heat it up gently to kill off the yeast. I dunno about the potassium sorbate method, but "cooking" your product is a very common way of stopping fermentation for sweet drinks.
@@lazarabach4264If you’re trying to make higher-proof stuff, another easy way to kill off yeast is to simply add more alcohol. Adding a neutral high-alcohol spirit (Everclear works great since it’s basically straight ethanol) and bringing the ABV up into the high teens will generally kill off all the little critters (exact threshold depends on the yeast you’re using), and then you can add/retain sugar without worrying about further fermentation. This is how port wine is made.
Not sure if someone else has mentioned but rosehips are essentially the fruiting body's of roses. They may taste similar to the flowers but they are a different thing with a distinct taste! I highly recommend messing about with homemade rosehip cordials/syrups to get a better idea of the flavour because its amazing!
I’m so proud of you Greg.
Mead is one of the most magical things you can make. The relative ease compared to beer or wine is amazing, and it ages so beautifully.
P.S. I would LOVE to see you make beer.
that cookbook is legit too. Horker meatloaf came out SO good
I don't know anything about making mead, I haven't even tried it myself IRL. But, I do know a LOT about Skyrim.
The quest you were talking about in the video is part of the Thieves Guild questline. You team up with Maven Black-Briar (owner of Black-Briar Meadery) to put a competing meadery out of business (Honningbrew Meadery, owned by Sabjorn). To achieve this, you are to show up as a pest exterminator to remove Skeevers (Giant rats basically) from the meadery's basement and the tunnels they've created underneath. These tunnels lead to the boilery house where the mead is made. The clever part is that the owner of Honningbrew Meadery gives you the rat poison to exterminate the pests, in addition to dumping the poison into one of the brewing vats. The captain of the guard shows up to try a tasting of Honningbrew Mead and is poisoned as a result, which results in Sabjorn being arrested, and his assistant (whom is secretly aligned with Black-Briar Meadery) takes ownership, effectively putting Black-Briar Meadery's main competitor both out of business, and gaining Maven a new store to increase profits.
Also, Skyrim is home to a lot of different landscapes and climates. It's not all just snowy wasteland. There's marshes, mountains, forests and plains. Each main city, and even their smaller villages and towns will have different ways of making mead and different ingredients that are available. Honningbrew uses lavender because there's a lot of lavender naturally growing in the area. Black-Briar does not use lavender because none grows in the area where it is produced. Even towns in the same region will have different tasting meads due to how the craft is taught, mostly from father to son, and so on. Recipes were likely rarely ever written down, and measurements for the ingredients were done by hand or by eye instead of using dedicated measuring tools.
Sorry for the giant essay, but I thought I'd just mention those two things because I don't see anyone else here talking about it.
I would absolutely love an episode on cider making! One of my childhood favorite holiday drinks is a soft cider where you simmer it with cinnamon and an orange stuck full of cloves, and it would be really interesting to see how Greg approaches that as a hard cider
He'd really love the cardamom notes in it.
I'd love seeing a "types of cider" episode in the future, like apple, cherry, peach...something wild...
Apple jack!!
Pear wine!? Rustic pear wine!?!
Pls no we dont wand that pseudogood stuff
@@Max77Prime Cry a river.
I made “mead” once, with a beer making kit I got one Christmas, instead of the included stuff in the kit, I used something called Michele’s Honey Creme syrup, and after 6 months, what it made was the best tasting drink ever.
I've been making mead for 14 years, and we actually use poland spring for brewing... it's not because it's special but rather it is consistent. Works great
Awesome! I have my second batch of mead aging now. One thing you should try next time is brewing in a simple plastic or glass container for the first few weeks and THEN siphoning to an aging vessel. That gets the mead off the dead yeast and tames some of the funk and reduces the cloudiness. The Compleat Meadmaker by Ken Schramm is a good resource. Very excited for more HTD home brewing content!
I would love to see some beer brewing episodes. I know there's a lot out there about brewing already but I would love to see some absolutely crazy beer ideas come to life, like a mojito beer or an aperol spritz beer.
Genus Brewing does really interesting (sometimes over the top) beer recipes. They're a commercial brewery/homebrew shop and AFAIK they usually serve the weird stuff they make in videos.
Love this episode, Mead is really easy to make and very good.
One thing to remember is that if your mead tastes really harsh after fermentation don't worry it will mellow out drastically in the bottle as it ages. Many mead makers don't touch their mead until it has been in the bottle for 6 months or a year.
Also any mead you have had that is sweet is probably backsweetened. You could add extra honey on the front end, but its easier and more exact to add it after fermentation is done.
Last thing is to not worry too much about your fermentation, mead tends to be pretty forgiving about most things and is pretty hard to mess up.
25:19 I immediately stopped what I was doing and yelled "NO WAIT!" and went back to check. @How To Drink actually just ate rose hips. PSA to everyone else, don't eat whole rose hips. There's little hairs inside the fruit that will irritate your bowels as they pass through.
My family loves rosehip tea, but I always felt the irritation in my mouth so much that I couldn't enjoy the taste
A HTD series where you go into different alcohol making methods would be interesting! Maybe make cocktails and recipes using the booze you make, see how they compare to one's made with commercially available alcohol
I picked up the cookbook a few years ago and fell in love with making mead because of it. recently tried a year aged blackbriar and definitely suggest halving the clove. Juniper was by far my family and I's favorite!
I have that book and the fallout one. They are surprisingly solid recipes
@@nightstar6179 the fallout has some good homestyle American recipes. My family uses it constantly
Nice! I had no idea either book existed… definitely going to get it
I'd love to see you make beers and wines occasionally. I think it would have to be something interesting though, like an apricot wine or cranberry wine, or a heather and gorse beer. Anything that would add to the knowledge of beer and wine without being a repeat that's been done thousands of times.
If you'd like to try your hand at making mead, in addition to what Greg does here, there's a recipe that's been floating around on the internet for years called Joe's Ancient Orange Mead. You do need a couple of specialized things to ferment and bottle it, but it can be made entirely with ingredients from your grocery store. Though it makes a sweeter mead rather than a dry one.
It's been a while since I've made any, but it was tasty enough that I after the first gallon-sized batch, I went back and made a five gallon batch.
(Also, I've had a fermentation go wrong with a raspberry imperial stout after I bottled it. Let's just say that the term for that is 'bottle bombs' and let you imagine the horrific mess that made.)
University me doesn’t understand why I didn’t make this in my room in college. Seems relatively easy and accessible.
@@markstaud Getting busted during room inspections maybe? ;D
JAOM is actually really accessible and a nice intro into mead with flavors we tend to like, since plain mead has a flavor most of us aren't familiar with today. It's not bad, IMO, but like many alcoholic beverages you kinda have to train your palette to understand it.
If you continue to homebrew, I recommend waiting for your sample to cool down before taking the specific gravity measurement. Or atleast record the temp for more accurate results. You have all the equipment to get fairly clean mead, you just gotta rack it atleast once after primary. You can leave everything in primary when it comes to beer but because wines take longer to age you gotta rack em off the sediment for a cleaner flavor profile
The quick mead goes really well with the Mud crab dip recipe. Tbf there's a lot of good recipes in that book.
I would love to see you do more brewing! Please do that. Personally, I would like to see a farmhouse ale style and experimentation with different beer styles. It would also be cool to see you collaborate with the folks at Whiskey Tribe and try your hand at distilling. Maybe even a Rum?
Maybe follow some channels that know something about brewing.
@@mikeshomestead9411 It was asked up front in this episode when showing the new machine: "Would you like to see How To Drink do some brewing? Let me know!"
Why be like this?
@@epsi9923 because I saw a lot of misinformation here. There are plenty of good home brew channels to follow.
"How thick is my ginger!?" This episode is for the ages, Greg. ALL TIME GREAT.
You can make vinegar out of just about any alcohol you ferment, including mead!
Might not be on-brand for the channel, but it's really cool to try (and can have incredible results!)
And then he can make shrubs with it!
@@supermilena2846 I'd never heard of a shrub, but now I've got to try one, lol
@@angrystickfig if you going to make shrub make sure to use nice vinigar. if you use cheep stuff it will never taste great imo
@@XDrSinusX I actually happened upon a place yesterday that sells really nice vinegars; I was thinking of picking up either a fig or raspberry vin cotto
I've been homebrewing beer for a decade now, and I've accidentally made vinegar a handful of times, thanks to failing at sanitizing or old equipment that needed replacing.
Unfortunately, I never had need for 23L of vinegar, so it always winds up down the drain when that happens.
I heartily recommend trying to make a bochet if you're interested in having another go at it! Essentially you caramelize the honey in a big pot for a couple hours (making your house smell delicious) before turning it into mead, has a darker, more complex, toffee sort of flavor, and it's still probably easier to make than any beer. Skål!
This is a fantastic video. I love the high production quality, the down to earth host, and the crew getting in on the action too. This is a great show, and man... I've been playing skyrim again and once again. I've got a hankering for mead. Gotta try this out sometime! Thank you for the fantastic content! You've earned a sub!
100%. Yes, let's get a beer/cider/wine/mead making arc!
I've been a home brewer since the mid 90's. Its a great hobby - part art, part science, and all kinds of room for experimentation. I've also done mead and cider. I heartily support an endeavors into zymurgy Greg!
Great to see mead being brought into the lime light again.
To help with the funky flavor try using fermaid O for yeast nutrient and if you plan on back sweetening below the abv tolerance of your yeast use stabilizers first so the batch doesn’t referment. Food grade buckets will make life much easier before oaking too.
Hope you continue your brewing adventures!
The frickin cardimum/clove gag during the blackbriar tasting was hilarious. It never stopped being funny, I could pratically hear the outrage while editing. I can't wait to make my own mead!! I'd be interested in a HTD video on your own mead recipe, eventually
I'm 19, not even old enough to drink, yet it's so fun to watch this channel l, idk why
My dad and I tried making these a couple of years ago, and they turned out pretty great (give or take a batch or two)! Highly recommended (especially the Honningbrew mead, it's considered the best in-game for a reason) as something to quaff with others. Good stuff as always!
Yes! This makes me so happy! So glad you made this. I always make the lavender bread for events, and I really want to start making mead to go with it, so this is so helpful
Please be careful with lavender. It works as a laxative. I made lavender mead some time ago and it gave me the runs.
There are loads of brewtube channels that are pretty well dedicated to making mead. Mead is surprisingly simple to make. Be warned, once you start, you will be hooked on the process.
Would love to see some recipes for Morrowind beer and liquor if you go more this direction. Mazte (Saltrice beer) Sujamma (No clue what sujamma is). And of course you can just do a ton of Skooma.
Mazte is basically sake. Saltrice is a salt-water rice-like grain containing caffeine. Basically 4loko rice wine.
Flin is just Cyrodiil whiskey. Nothing fantasical here, just some top shelf whiskey. However, it IS a whiskey, which implies Nirn has barley... this is important for Sujamma.
Sujamma, Shein, and Greef are all based on the comberry. Comberries are interesting as they are described as red berries that are bitter the warmer the climate they grow in is. That makes me think the closest we're getting to comberries is Muscadine grapes, which grow sweeter the colder the climate.
That makes Shein a Muscadine grape wine.
Greef is comberry brandy... so a Muscadine grape brandy.
And Sujamma is the outlier. It is described in basically every game multiple times as "extremely potent", described in Morrowind as brewed using comberries and local grain, and _only_ _once_ in ESO said to be a mix of comberry, lemon, and barley. So my guess for Sujamma is a moonshine or grain whiskey flavored with Muscadine grapes and a hint of citrus.
Heck, if you really want to get crazy...
Bosmer have jagga, which is fermented pig milk and honey. Or their rotmeth, which is alcohol made from the liquid from rancid meat purified with spices. They also have Sun Dusk Ale, which is rotmeth ale described as smelling like a "juicy steak marinated in a plum wine with coriander".
On a lighter note the argonians of Black Marsh have ale, which is easy to do. And theilul, which is fermented cane sugar. They also have something based on Hist Sap, but other than a single passing reference in Oblivion this sap drink is never mentioned again.
Hammerfell has rum. Heck, Skyrim has a fetch quest to steal some imported redguard rum.
Skyrim also has Aalto wine made from jazbay grapes.. which look and are described as tasting a lot like sloe berries. So a sloe berry wine.
I always thought that skooma was just liquid catnip becuase the kahjeet loved it, at least until the dawnguard dlc quest where you go into a skooma den that is run by vampires, then I started thinking skooma is some kind of drug like heroin
My wife and I have been making wine, beer, and melomels for a few years so I didn’t learn much about the whole process. I’m still watching this from start to finish just because I enjoy watching your team and you explain things. Great video.
I’d like to see how to drink tackle more fermented beverages. I think it’s safe to say there’s a healthy crossover between home craft mixologists and home brewers/winemakers/meadmakers. With your flair for incorporating pop culture into your drinks, there’s a lot of potential content to explore in pop culture themed fermented beverages. And it opens up doors for home fortified wine. I am absolutely confident that you could make some rocking home fortified wines, and I’m very interested in copying whatever you come up with.
I have been planning to start my own mead business for a few months now, and I see this in my RUclips feed. I feel like this is a sign
Hope jury duty doesn't keep you away too long. I'm excited about your fan cocktail recipes episode
I got this cookbook for Christmas and my fiancé and I were going to make the mead this weekend, this video’s timing was perfect for us thank you!
This episode was awesome, great work as always Greg! I’d love to see HTD delve into the world of home brewing, there’s so much room for creativity and expression in that world and you’re already a creative guy so I’d love to see what you can do. As someone who has to be gluten free I would definitely love to see you do some ciders like you were talking about in this video. Either way, thanks for the content :)
I brew my own mead too, on a very small scale and one step I feel you really missed was de-floccing your mead after about 1 month (for sweet mead) or at most 2 by dropping in some bentonite clay, waiting a day or two and then racking (transferring) your newly clear and not cloudy mead into it's smaller final contaners to age properly for another month or two. Then you will have a brighter, clear and clean mead that will taste more of the honey as well making it taste closer to a German dessert wine then a dry wine. ( would also suggest primary fermentation be done in a glass carboy but that's up to you.)
Yeah, I used to work in a winery, and racking the wine after secondary fermentation was essential. Not only is that dead yeast sludge fairly disgusting, but the slurry of organic matter is also a breeding ground for all kinds of microorganisms that can majorly affect the quality of the final product.
And yes, there are plenty of microorganisms that can live and thrive in alcoholic environments.
I loved Cornholio. I remember visiting the Alamo when I was like 17. My grandparents are from Mexico/Texas so they speak Spanish. During the visit I was just repeating lines from Beavis. I swore he said "tienes tus papeles" in one episodes. I don't speak Spanish but I said that and made my grandma and grandpa laugh. Grandma asks, "do you know what that means?" Me: "no...?" Grandma: "you asked if I have my papers. Be careful who you say that around!".
We all died laughing for while but I stopped repeating that line for the duration of our visit in Texas haha
I am currently in the process of opening a meadery, I personally love the mead making venture. I would definitely watch more of this type of content, at least that is my vote!
Nicely done! Our first adventure in mead-making was actually cyser: a hard cider made with honey, or mead made with apple juice, if you prefer. It packs a wollop and it usually self-carbonates from the excess fructose in the apple juice.
I would be SO excited for you to make ciders and meads more frequently, Greg! Please go wild with it!
Watching this video 3 months after it first aired is actually pretty serendipitous
The editing on this episode is incredible.
Edit: I just noticed a single frame where the "weeks/months later" graphic gets mixed up. This isn't a criticism and doesn't change my opinion that this video's editing is awesome. I just found it funny I noticed it right after commenting this.
It's fantastic to see you try new things and you're going to learn so much about brewing and what's important in it. Looking forward to more brewing stuff (and less things like shaking a fermented product in open air, heating honey, etc. These things are not wrong, but generally frowned upon lol)!
Very cool episode
I'm having an old fashioned, ( they way he makes it ) and laughing my head off, cause this was by far...the best episode. All the effects and such just made it soo entertaining
I'm a big fan of dryer meads, they're delicious. It was a huge (very pleasant) surprise the first time I ran into one since up until that point I'd only ever really had really sweet Chaucer's spiced mead around the holidays.
I dont know who you are but I will always follow anyone that makes mead and plays skyrim. Thank you !
I bought the official Skyrim cookbook about five years ago and I've been making mead ever since. I have a 2 litre bottle of Nord Mead that has been aging since June of 2020. It's *_delectable._*
Not the "chai tea" 🥲
Lol @ the cardamon repeating, we all have our moments.
I would love to see more brewing episodes - mead, beer, wine, et cetera! I've been wanting to get into brewing before I was even "of-age" to drink, so I'll definitely watch those episodes. Doesn't even have to be alcoholic, I know cola syrups and such have been made with just saucepans and whatever in the past, but there are so many drinks that can be made with the process, I'd be interested to see what you can come up with!
You are supposed to prep your barrel by filling it with water and letting it soak for a few days so that it swells and seals. This also reduces 'angels share'. The reason those are leaking is they are not lacquered.
I don't know if this may be something lost in translated, but barrels should absolutely not be lacquered? Lacquer would stop the flavouring from the wood.
But on the topic of letting the barrels swell - a 100%, not doing it is just a waste.
I never had a problem with a leaky barrel filling it right after firing.
@@mvicksdog I could imagine so. But looking at these barrels they may not exactly be the prime candidates. Hard to tell of course, but they're definitely not weathered in any capacity.
You could also steam clean them beforehand which would seal them too
He mentioned that no amount of soaking would stop the leaking, so it seems like just badly made barrels.
Excited to see Greg making his own liquor, and I can't think of a better place to start
He probably won’t be making liquor as it’s illegal. He may make it, but almost definitely not on camera (unless of course he gets a license and all that, but I just don’t see him doing it)
Total home brewing guide by How to Drink would be awesome.
Filming the mead making process is a lot of work and waiting, very commendable! Long time fan of the channel, this was great fun to watch as mead makers. Yeast selection is definitely the most variable and can change a recipe completely. Thanks for spreading the word about mead!
This is one of the more interesting videos I've watched. In general, not just your channel. I use to home brew beer back before the days of the NutriChef and other fancy gear. As microbrewery beer became available in the US it became easier just to buy the beer. I have looked into making mead and I think I even have a book somewhere. If I was a lot younger I would get one of those Nutrichefs and take it up as a hobby. As a retired Chemical Engineer we like this stuff. One tip I would add for cutting-up the fruit is to use a vegetable mandoline or chopper. I'm not a big fan of cutting things into tiny pieces with a knife.
Hello from a brand new Chemical Engineering thinking about taking up brewing as a hobby
@@ketra1504 It's an interesting hobby with a lot of resources: books, magazines (Zymurgy), conventions etc... with tips and recipes. I just had a large pot, a carboy, bottling equipment, and some gadgets such as airlocks, etc. Nowadays a lot of specialized equipment is available for a price. Of course if you really enjoy the hobby the equipment can be worth it for making things easier, with perhaps better results. The various ingredients are in general readily available and not that expensive. Stuff like malted barley and other grains, hops, yeast, etc.. One thing is that you end-up with a lot of beer, usually batches are about 5 gallons. As you brew good beer and ales your friends will probably be glad to help get rid of the beer. Perhaps with modern equipment you can make smaller batches. Anyway, have fun with the hobby if you take the plunge, and the mantra for the hobby is: "Relax, Don't Worry, Have a Homebrew".
Hi fellow ChemEs! (30-something here)
No shock that we're common in the hobby lol.
I haven't made beer for a few years but have gotten back into brewing because my wife and I love cider so much and in my opinion it's a GREAT way to start brewing. Simple and rewarding if you like it and want to experiment with flavors like in this episode.
You touched on the various yeasts, one thing that surprised me was just how each type brought its own flavours.
Bread yeast was the most interesting. Straight off ferment it tasted like jet fuel mixed with cat piss, but after 2 years of bottle ageing, it's one of my favourites.
I'd really love to see you compare different at-home beer brewing kits. I've got one that has a fancy glass bottle and the mash and everythin' included and it seems more substantial than the ol' Mr. Beer. But I'd love to hear your thoughts on the different flavors or qualities with yer skilled buds. :)
Always happy to see mead! Excellent stuff man
My Norwegian grandparents made a lot of their own Meads . They were born in the early 1900s . You can make mead out if almost anything . It is cheap and easy. I remember they'd have 6-10 Carboys going at all times. They were also alcoholics
I believe you are to ferment in a different container then transfer to the park Barrel for the woods notes so that you don’t drink the spent yeast which I understand can impart odd flavors. Just a thought. Very entertaining video! I’ll be watching more
I did this before with gallon jugs of water from the store instead of fancy barrels, here's some tips:
- Try champaign yeast, you can get even higher avb if you want, fit more honey into the same volume of water.
- Grow the ginger root in a pot over the spring & summer, harvest the fronds & hang dry them for next batch. Ginger leaf is a secret herb that is similar to root but notably different. If you have a long enough growing season it might flower.
- Seeds can make it bitter (prob cyanide), if you have a lot, or break or cut the seeds, it will be more bitter than just loose seeds. Imo grow the seeds as houseplants.
- Boil the honey until it turns *black* and smells like your roommates will be enraged. Then rinse it into your fermenter. Sounds insane, is actually good. Avoid killing yourself! if it splashes on someone they will surely die irl & you don't have innate fire resist, outlander.
- citrus peels / oleo saccharum works -- oleoresins work (try putting in frankincense & myrrh, it'll be fine as long as you don't put too much, it will be very bitter and change the texture a lot)
- weird additions of different spices & herbs can give really unexpected interesting results
Bochet (caramelized honey mead) is as you said - can be dangerous - prospective bochet makers should be mindful when quenching (do it outside) as the honey gets to Candy/Caramel-Temps (320F/160C+) which will instantly boil any the water it first comes in contact with - resulting the afore mentioned splashing of said very hot honey-caramel. Also note it will greatly increase in volume as it 'foams' in the heating process.
That said - It is tasty if you don't mess it up like I have in the past. I've had to literally chisel dried honey-caramel off my floor.
@@uncledrax it's true. What I did was use the biggest pot I had, cut the heat and wait for it to cool, but while it was still warm start rinsing it out of the pot into the fermentation vessel with the water it will ferment in. A small batch + big pot + some patience kept me from losing my face & made clean up way easier than I expected. Timing it so it's warm & easy to dissolve but not so hot that it could explode is pretty critical if you decide to try it -- low & slow, imo. Water should be room temp or hot. Still cooked the honey to the point where it smelled like I ruined it, but it turned out great. No burned particles, but the honey was very, very caramelized.
E: slowly rinse it out in stages if your entire batch's volume is too big to fit into the pot at once. If you get candy glass fused into the pot somehow gently rewarm it with water so it dissolves cleanly. Make sure to stir at all times while the heat is on.
The range in honey is probably for your preference. You can get more dry or sweet mead depending on your honey, the amount of honey, and the yeast you use. My first mead was just a basic honey and water with a wine yeast I don't remember at the moment what yeast it was but it's like the most common basic wine yeast you can get came out super good. I added more honey than I needed to, think it was 4 lbs but it came out strong and sweet and really easy to drink. Best thing I ever did.
@How to Drink, now that all 3 anniversary drinks for Assassin's Creed have released, can you do a video tasting and making cocktails with them. Thank you and I love your videos.
Don't know how you ended up on my recommendations but I'm glad I stuck around
Next time backsweeten just a smidge. Just be sure to add potassium sorbate/metabisulfate before backsweetening.
I like a very dry mead but it doesn't have a lot of honey flavor. the solution is to simply put honey in (sweetening it)
I probably would've gone glass carboys for your first mead (as much as the wood would help change the flavour, but that can be added to them too). Easier to work with and reusable.
Or a PVC bucket that's sold for fermenting. They're easier to clean & sanitize, and they come in a variety of sizes.
@@Antaios632 If it is "quick", sure. I don't personally trust plastics for when the contents are going to stay in there a while.
It likes to leech flavours from what I've seen/heard...
@@derickwiebe yeah, I'm talking about the initial fermentation. I rack off into glass bottles after that. You really shouldn't have a problem with off-flavors as long as you're using food-grade plastics intended for brewing. So, like, using a 5 gallon bucket from Home Depot, all bets are off. 😂
Hope someday you can somehow tackle skooma (both regular and red water). Or the spiced wine sold in solitude ❤
Skooma isn't a drink though, it's just elder scrolls' version of opium. If it were alcohol they'd serve it in bars, not "dens".
@@1Seanmb Skooma is a drink, it is a liquid distilled from moon sugar. They drink the liquid or vaporize it.
@@1Seanmb True. It is kind of like as close to a drink as edibles are to actual food.
@@1Seanmb Skooma is also described as thick and syrup-like that can be drank or heated up and cooked into vapor for a skooma pipe.
Skooma is also supposedly extremely addictive. One use and you're craving it for life.
I made just a honey-water mead once. First time anything like that. I used a honey from our farm. Fermentation took a little extra time.
But what I had was the most delicious honey-lemon-grass drink I've ever had lol. Also the first time I tried a mead.
It's so easy to do it I can't recommend enough. You really don't need wood barrels though I am sure you can add in some neat flavors. Those tiny barrels are pretty darn cute though.
What guide did you use?
OMG, THANK YOU. I've been trying to figure out how to use the hydrometer for my home made wine because I don't add yeast, I use berries from my garden which already have yeast in them, and the people at the beer brewing store were not very helpful. So my wine has always had some unknown amount of alcohol in it. And now I can actually measure it!
as someone thats only made mead 3 times right now, after about 2 or 3 weeks into the fermentation you want to check how dry it is and if fermentation has finished you want to pour off the liquid, leaving behind the yeast and let that age instead. after a few months it gets more clear
Do a video on making homemeade Amaro and other complex herbal liquers! I made a batch of Aquavit this christmas to give out and most people loved it! (everyone who didn't love it hated it, a very marmite situation)
I can say, doing an episode on brewing beer might be a good idea bcs that's a popular topic and also you're a trustworthy source of information for recipes (I didn't give lime/lemon superjuice a try until I asked you on Twitter about it and you told me it was good)
I'd love to see more fermentation videos... even if it's to see the mistakes 😆
I Make mead every summer in time for hunting season and get togethers with people in the fall, my all time favorite drink.
I recently made this black-briar mead recipe and I love it. I also got around to playing skyrim for the first time at the same time.
oh this was fascinating! So many of my confused and distant memories of my dad trying to homebrew things make more sense now. I really would love to see some beermaking, and cidering.
Make beer?? ABSOLUTELY!! Would love a series on making different styles.
Back when I used to brew a lot of beer, I bottled with a little too much priming sugar. I was awakened in the middle of the night to the sound of 24 carefully crimped bottle caps hitting the ceiling and 24 individual ale volcanoes. Once the excess CO2 blew off, it had pretty much done its thing, so I consolidated the bottles, recapped them, and named it artillery ale. It was pretty good.
Hearing about the airlock reminded me of a story passed down. Great grampa used to ferment his own cream soda and rootbeer. One summer himself and great gramma went on vacation while there was a forgotten batch in the basement. They were quite well sealed in glass… I’m not sure what the big vessels would be called… no airlocks. They came home from Mexico, to a really nasty sticky and tank basement… and great grampa had to find a new hobby XD
Rose hips are the swollen ovary of the rose plant. They are dried and used for lots of things, and are a powerhouse of vitamin c.