Peach Mead 4 (Mead to Carboy)

Yesterday, I transferred the mead from the paint bucket to the carboy, because I no longer have to mix in the yeast nutrient every 24 hours. Now, the mixture will sit for about a week and a half before I have to add the pectic enzyme.

Peach Mead 3 (Bucket Modification and Bubbling)

While my roommate was working on cutting a hole in the lid, the yeast had generated enough foam to almost spill out of the bucket again.

The first rough cuts were made with a rip saw Dremel attachment.

The last bit of material removal and smoothing was done with a standard drum sander Dremel attachment.

Bung and airlock in place!

After 24 hours from when the yeast first went in, I had to put in the next ¼ of yeast nutrient and degas the mead with a hand drill and a paint mixer. The yeast got a little carried away, and the mixture kept foaming over the bucket even with the lid on, so we had to improvise. With a Dremel handy, my roommate cut and polished a hole in the top of the paint bucket lid such that we could install our bung and airlock, preventing further spillage of the mead.

Peach Mead 2 (Yeast Addition)

2 packs of Red Star Montrachet yeast and 1/4 of the yeast nutrient, and 1/4 of the pectic enzyme was dissolved in water and added to the mead mix.

Here’s my roommate mixing the mead with a hand drill and a paint mixer. Some of the honey had settled to the bottom of the container and needed plenty of stirring.

We had to wait an entire day to let the temperature of the ingredients to drop to ambient air temperature. It’s best for the mead to brew at 60 F, but with the ambient air temperature over 80 F, we had to just mix the yeast in and hope for the best. I accidentally mixed up the yeast nutrient and pectic enzyme, so I ended up adding ¼ of the pectic enzyme in along with ¼ of the yeast nutrient. Hopefully that won’t change things too much.

Peach Mead 1 (Peach Purée)

The peaches were almost completely defrosted at this point. I had to leave some of the puree in the blender, otherwise it wouldn’t blend properly.

The peaches were pretty tasty, but lacked the crispness of a fresh white peach.

Almost done with the puree!

After boiling the Irish moss, we dropped the temperature by adding the peach puree. We then placed the pot in a water bath to drop the temperature to 110 F before adding the honey.

This is the second step of mead making. The first step involved pitting, cutting, freezing, and defrosting the peaches. Freezing the peaches bursts the cell walls, thus allowing the yeast to get to the nutrients more easily. Defrosting is not necessary with a good blender, but you’ll probably have to reheat the water.

Because we didn’t have a really large pot on hand to mix 5 gallons worth of fluid, we broke up the process into 4 batches with two different pots. All of the ingredients were later mixed in a 5 gallon paint bucket.

Peach Mead Instructions

So I haven’t been posting a whole lot lately, even though I’ve been doing a whole bunch of things. I’ll try to keep this better updated, because in the end, it’s mostly for my own good.

In any event, I’ll be trying to make some peach mead in the next couple months, because one of my roommates wanted to give it a shot. After doing some research, I ended up putting together my own instructions for making peach mead. If you feel daring enough, feel free to follow along! The instructions aren’t final, and I’ll probably be making some minor changes on the way. If you need any clarification on steps, ask away!

Oh, and if you would rather have a PDF copy of the instructions, it’s available here.

Peach Mead Instructions.docx