Adventures in Beekeeping: Mead Making

With the two hives I established this year I got about 3 gallons of honey and 20+ containers of cut-comb, which as far as I can tell is unheard of for new beekeepers. And I jarred a lot of it…

But at the end of the season I still had a gallon of honey sitting in a bucket that I hadn’t done anything with.

Now, I’m not a huge fan of “sweet” drinks. All the red wine you see in my pictures is fairly dry and I’ve slowly switched from wheat beers to things that are more hoppy… sweet just isn’t my thing. So when one of my fantastically bearded ex-boyfriends (the one that owns a bar) kept insisting that I use my leftover gallon of honey to make mead I was like yeah, yeah, yeah, not my thing…

Ha.

Doesn’t even matter that we’re not dating anymore, the man still delights in proving me wrong. So he set up a tasting with Schramm’s Mead, which happened to be when the film crew was at the farm, so we took a small break from building stuff to learn things like, according to this taste-wheel, honey can have the flavor of, say, cat pee…

Not even joking. That’s a real thing honey can taste like, along with other fun flavors like “barnyard” and “sweaty”. Yay, honey?

I don’t even know… bees are still amazing. I’m also super grateful to Schramm’s Mead for answering all of my questions about honey and mead and giving me a copy of this book written and signed by their founder Ken Schramm…

So awesome. Also loved the part where Roberto made Jesse walk up to his bar several times and “smile sexy”….

Hahahaha. I can’t even type that shit with a straight face.

I’m so lucky to have had such awesome men in my life, and luckier that we can be friends after the “this isn’t going to work long-term” conversation, which, let’s be honest, is kind of inevitable with me. (And I don’t mean that in a negative way. I’m incredibly happy for all my fantastic ex-boyfriends, especially when they find wonderful women to be a part of their lives who are way better for them than I could have been. I hope that comes across as genuine, because it is. Men I date are no different than the other friends I welcome in to my life, all of whom are amazing, and I want every single one of them to find their own happiness, whatever it maybe.) Relationships aside, I’m super grateful that Jesse insisted I make mead out of my honey, and even more grateful for my neighbors/homebrewing friends who helped with the actual processing of the honey…

We decided to make a raspberry mead, so we boiled a gallon of honey along with some water and about 4-5 pounds of raspberries, then poured it into a glass carboy and added some yeast (and maybe a few other secret ingredients that I can’t remember because it was after midnight)…

It’s going to ferment in this state for a month, then we’re going to strain it and give it another 3 months to get fully ripe, and then we’re going to taste-test it sometime in May.

This is obviously my first time with something like this, but I’m hoping to learn enough so that in coming years I can use the berries and fruit from my garden along with my own honey (and water straight from the well) to make something that truly captures the taste of the farm…

In the meantime, expect the final verdict (aka tasting) sometime in May.

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