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Check this out guys.

  • PATRONS: Did you know we've a chat function for you now? Look to the bottom of the screen, you can chat, set up rooms, talk to each other individually or in groups! Click 'Chat' at the right side of the chat window to open the chat up.
  • Love Gotmead and want to see it grow? Then consider supporting the site and becoming a Patron! If you're logged in, click on your username to the right of the menu to see how as little as $30/year can get you access to the patron areas and the patron Facebook group and to support Gotmead!
  • We now have a Patron-exclusive Facebook group! Patrons my join at The Gotmead Patron Group. You MUST answer the questions, providing your Patron membership, when you request to join so I can verify your Patron membership. If the questions aren't answered, the request will be turned down.
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Squatchy

Lifetime GotMead Patron
Lifetime GotMead Patron
Nov 3, 2014
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So there have been many new comers to our site. Nice to have you all here.

I just wanted to tell you all that we have a "patrons" side of the forum as well. This is a "pay to join" portion of the site. The cost is so slight compared to all the added info that I would strongly suggest you guys to consider joining if you are serious about making good mead. Just the proven recipes alone are worth the cost. Think of all the money saved if your not tossing failures down the drain.
How would you like to start making great meads right from the start instead of floundering around making marginal stuff for a year or two. Before you finally fall into your grove.

You web guys know that this just doesn't happen for free. Lots of cost every year to keep a site like this alive. This is the best site on the web by far and we should all pitch in to help.

So come back here after you step up and become a patron to sound off.

By the way I don't have any special connection here and don't receive a thing if you become a patron. I just felt it time to introduce the newbee's to this option for better success.
 
Probably the push I needed, thanks for the tip.

Sent from my XT1254 using Tapatalk
 
I also have no connection to this website that gives me anything when people become patrons. Simply as a way to help out newbies, I'd like to offer my 2 cents for why this is the site to use if you want to learn how to make mead, especially as a patron. I'll base it off of my own experience with mead.

I'm still very new to making mead, coming up on two and half years in the hobby. When I started, as I am now, I was obsessed with trying to make the best tasting mead I could. So, I spent hours and hours poring over ingredients and different types of honey, trying to find the best spice combinations, fruit combinations, most exotic types of honey, etc. I also spent a ton of money on buying highly prized honey along with the shipping costs associated with heavy shipments from really far away. Some meads were good, some were bad, but most were decent/marginal at best. And no great ones. Basically, not worth the amount of money and time I was putting into it. I couldn't have told you a thing about pH, temp control, rehydration, nutrition, aeration, sulfites, TA, etc.

Then I read Ken Schramms article about a year ago on opitmizing honey (https://www.homebrewersassociation.org/attachments/0000/1256/NDzym05_MasterMead.pdf). The first paragraph really grabbed my attention: making great mead is about optimizing honey fermentation. That means optimizing the health of your yeast. After that realization, the hours I spent working up the perfect ingredients became hours researching how to make the yeast the healthiest they can be-- and therefore best fermentations and best tasting meads.

There's a ton of free information on the web, and while its free, a lot of it is purely anecdotal or flat out wrong. I found this forum and pretty much stopped using all the others. There are so many knowledgeable and reliable guys and gals on this website (and you can find out who they are after using this site for just a little bit of time) that following their advice allowed my mead techniques' quality to skyrocket after just a short period. I learned from their mistakes, their countless hours of research, read what they were reading, etc. This meant that I didnt have to waste a ton more money and time slowly learning how to make better mead. And its not difficult either :)

You can make phenomenal, top quality mead with just basic honey (ie, local wildflower or clover), water and yeast. Don't get me wrong, the honey should still be high quality, and ingredient selection is very important in any drink/food. But my point is, in my experience, you can't make top rate mead even with top rate ingredients if your techniques are bad. I mention this because I see a lot of newbies describing poor protocols they used, but asking questions on their ingredients/yeast selection-- like I did -- and not the protocols they used to make the mead.

So, not to be long winded, but... my 2 cents for newbies would be to avoid my mistakes and focus on techniques first - proper rehydration, staggered nutritions, pH, temp controls, aeration, degassing, utilizing hydrometers every day, to name a few. There's no better forum than this to research them. And if you are really serious about mead and expect to be putting a lot of money into the hobby as I did, becoming a Patron will open up a TON of more information as well. You will save a lot of money by avoiding marginal or flawed batches, and your mead will become much better in a very short amount of time.

Skal
 
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