I have access to as much honey as i want and while ive made lots of mead in the past i am ultimately a red wine drinker. i want to make dried elderberry mead and am looking for a recipe. Is it just a case of making mead as usual and adding dried elderberrys?
Dried elderberry mead
- Thread starter Gambler72
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I have a recipe on our elderberry page. Dried elderberry mead is just about our favorite. We like to soak the berries overnight and then gently simmer them and ferment on the berries. A nice dark rich honey goes well with dried elderberries as does some oak. WVMJ
Figured out the problem. I was looking at the forum using tapatalk on my mobile phone which doesnt show the signature file. No problem when using a desktop pc. Thanks for your help that page was exactly what i was looking for. Going to be giving a lot of those recipes a go, starting with dried elderberry mead. Excellent site by the way wvmjack. Thanks again.
Elderberries, Dried 35 ounces
Potassium Metabisulfite 1/4 tsp
Tulip Poplar Honey 1 Gallon to start, adjust to SG 1.10
Pectinase, Liquid 10 ml
Yeast Nutrient at Start 5 tsp
Yeast Nutrient 1/3 Sugar Break, Fermocel P 15 gm
Acid Blend to 0.65% ~93 grams
Yeast Pasteur Red, EC-1118 or K1-V1116
Oakmor, Toasted 55 grams
This is the recipe on your site,
could you help me out with a few questions i have if possible.
1) Never seen pectinase liquid. I have Pectolase in power form. So how much would i use?
2)what does this line mean ........'Yeast Nutrient 1/3 Sugar Break, Fermocel P 15g' ?
3)how many teaspoons would 93g of acid blend be?
Any help would be much appreciated.
Potassium Metabisulfite 1/4 tsp
Tulip Poplar Honey 1 Gallon to start, adjust to SG 1.10
Pectinase, Liquid 10 ml
Yeast Nutrient at Start 5 tsp
Yeast Nutrient 1/3 Sugar Break, Fermocel P 15 gm
Acid Blend to 0.65% ~93 grams
Yeast Pasteur Red, EC-1118 or K1-V1116
Oakmor, Toasted 55 grams
This is the recipe on your site,
could you help me out with a few questions i have if possible.
1) Never seen pectinase liquid. I have Pectolase in power form. So how much would i use?
2)what does this line mean ........'Yeast Nutrient 1/3 Sugar Break, Fermocel P 15g' ?
3)how many teaspoons would 93g of acid blend be?
Any help would be much appreciated.
1. follow the instructions that came with your powder, I dont know where you got it from, I dont use the powdered stuff since we have the liquid stuff, but powdered will work just fine.
2. Staggered Nutrient Addition, I recommend you go to the Scotts Lab website and find their winemaking guide, its free, it explains a lot of things like staggared nutrients. The basic idea is that if you feed the yeast to rich a diet high in nitrogen from the start they get fat and bloated and dont work as hard and dont have a tough membrane because they grew to fast instead of a nice steady nutrient supply. Dont fret about it too much, many people just dump it all in at the start. The sugar break is just when 1/3 of the sugar has been consumed. Things are different if you are doing a high gravity mead.
3. Do a Total Acidity test on your juice before you add any honey to calculate how much acid they have, berries will of course vary in their acid content, if you are using Euro dried elders they will be different than American Elderberries, so 93 is just what we had to add, your mix might be different, better to go ahead and learn how to do a total acid test now so you can use it for all your future wines.
I really like Pasteur Red for this, and the K1V1116, but many other yeasts would work.
WVMJ
2. Staggered Nutrient Addition, I recommend you go to the Scotts Lab website and find their winemaking guide, its free, it explains a lot of things like staggared nutrients. The basic idea is that if you feed the yeast to rich a diet high in nitrogen from the start they get fat and bloated and dont work as hard and dont have a tough membrane because they grew to fast instead of a nice steady nutrient supply. Dont fret about it too much, many people just dump it all in at the start. The sugar break is just when 1/3 of the sugar has been consumed. Things are different if you are doing a high gravity mead.
3. Do a Total Acidity test on your juice before you add any honey to calculate how much acid they have, berries will of course vary in their acid content, if you are using Euro dried elders they will be different than American Elderberries, so 93 is just what we had to add, your mix might be different, better to go ahead and learn how to do a total acid test now so you can use it for all your future wines.
I really like Pasteur Red for this, and the K1V1116, but many other yeasts would work.
WVMJ
Thanks for the reply. So i add 5tsp of nutrient at the start then 15 grams after a third of it has been consumed. Never used an acid test kit before i just follow recipes, so looks like i'll need to get an acid test kit and learn how to use it then. sorry if i seem slow but im just used to following recipes (which gives all measuremets in tsp)so im struggling to see how you convert grams to tsp as things weigh different amounts i would of thought.
Easy, get a cheap electronic gram scale. I am not knocking recipes, its just that to me they are just a guide, if you cant get it exact close is good enough, if you get a hydrometer and a gram scale and a simple acid test kit you can make just about anything on your own. Take some pics so we can see how you are doing. When you remove the berries you can make a seconds, that is where you make a lower volume of wine from the left over elderberries, it will be lighter in color and flavor, that is why you make it lower volume, but you can use it to top off your big batch. WVMJ
Easy, get a cheap electronic gram scale. I am not knocking recipes, its just that to me they are just a guide, if you cant get it exact close is good enough, if you get a hydrometer and a gram scale and a simple acid test kit you can make just about anything on your own. Take some pics so we can see how you are doing. When you remove the berries you can make a seconds, that is where you make a lower volume of wine from the left over elderberries, it will be lighter in color and flavor, that is why you make it lower volume, but you can use it to top off your big batch. WVM
Thanks again for the reply. i look forward to making it. i'll keep you posted on how i get on
Off topic a shade, perhaps, but looking at WVMJack's recipe for Dried Elderberry Mead the header suggests the recipe is for 6 gallons but in the body of recipe procedures (bullet #6, I think) the suggestion is to make the volume 5 gallons. Are we to dilute 1 gallon of honey with 5 gallons of juice or 1 gallon of honey with 4 gallons of juice? If 1 gallon of honey is about 12 lbs and if an SG of 1.110 is equivalent to about 2.5 lbs of honey in a gallon then i think we are talking about 5 gallons total and not 6... but perhaps WVMJack could confirm this...
Good catch Bernard, thanks, corrected for 5 gallons, just one reason I dont like writing recipes! WVMJ
I have put chips in both the primary and the secondary, you could drop 50 grams in your primary and if its not enough oak when you rack to your secondary you can easily add the rest, this leaves you room to adjust after the first. Lots of opinions on oaking, we like to have a very slight taste of oak in the background of our elderberry but not competing with it, more of a supporting role in the background. Good luck, WVMJ
Bernard, it is also good to keep in mind that oak in the primary leaves a lot less "oakiness" than oak in the secondary (or later). This is why they will sometimes use new oak barrels for a primary fermentation as its first use. In my experience 2-3 ounces in primary matches up to 1 ounce late in the process. YMMV.
OK.... So I gave this recipe a go today and followed it perfectly. I bought an acid Test kit to measure the TA and that's when I had problems. First time using an acid Test kit so I read the instructions watched a few videos on how to do it and they all looked simple enough and straight forward. Problem was I couldn't get it to change colour. I added up to 10 ml of sodium hydroxide and no colour change. Any ideas why?
Did you add the color reagent phenolphthalein? Also you can dilute the sample with distilled water, the amount if dilution doesnt matter after you have measured your sample out because you are measuring the amount of acid in the sample. We use a white ceramic tile, put a dot in the middle, then after adding 0.5ml sample add another dot to the plate, add more NAOH, another drop, makes it easier to see the color change than just looking in the beaker. WVMJ
