Everything made with honey is going to taste sweet. Right? WRONG! That’s like assuming all wine made with grapes is going to be sweet because grapes are sweet. It all comes down to processing and ingredients.
Honey wine (or mead) contains honey, water (or juice) and yeast. Recipes typically call for two to three pounds of honey for every gallon to mead. Does this mean using three pounds will be sweet and two pounds will be dry? Not necessarily. During the fermentation process, sugar is converted to alcohol. Using more honey can result in wine with 18% alcohol by volume. Once converted to alcohol, the honey used is no longer, adding to the sweetness of the wine. There is a limit to the amount of sugar converted. Using 10 pounds of honey per gallon isn’t going to make a 100-proof wine!
Making honey wine is a multi-step process with several opportunities to add honey to impact the flavor and alcohol content. Once you add more honey, you can’t take it out. Unless the plan is to make something resembling ice wine, use the amount of honey called for in the recipe. Additional honey can be added during the back sweetening process. What’s back sweetening? Download our white paper on Homebrewed Craft Mead for a cherry mead recipe. BriskHeat silicone heaters were used to decrystallize and reduce the viscosity of the honey used. We enjoyed our Viking’s Blood.
BriskHeat Marketing staff celebrated Halloween early with a mead tasting
