Ginger Mead

Learn how to make this ancient and delicious beverage. With Ernest Harrop's perfected metheglin recipe you too can enjoy a dry sparkling ginger mead. With very few ingredients and a short aging process this tutorial will change the way you think about mead. Metheglin, or infused honey wine is one of many techniques to produce mead. It requires the similar equipment to make beer or wine, which makes the step into Mead production an easy one. The greatest thing about Ernest recipe is that it takes very little time to prepare and does not require the extended aging times of traditional straight mead (up to eight years!) With this technique you can be enjoying sparkling ginger mead in about a month, which is a beautiful thing. We were pleasantly surprised when we first tasted Ernest?s mead; it was not like any other mead we have tasted before. It is dry, sparkling and delicious. With essentially two ingredients, honey and ginger root this recipe is an exercise in simplicity and about producing a top quality beverage with great ingredients. In this tutorial Ernest uses some local honey, Urban Sweet Honey, conveniently located a few blocks from his house, which is featured in it?s own chapter. Watching Ernest prepare the ginger tea (2 ways), dissolve the must and the subsequent inoculation and rackings you will want to get started on your own batch of Mead as soon as possible, as well as learning some fun factoid about mead along the way. Sparkling mead, the new champagne! Table of Contents: 1. Introduction 2. Equipment 3. Recipe 4. Ingredients 5. Urban Sweet Honey 6. Ginger Tea 7. The Must 8. Sanitization 9. Original Gravity 10. Inoculation 11. Racking the Primary 12. Secondary Racking 13. Bottling 14. Terminal Gravity 15. Tasting