When I first decided to make homemade wine and mead I found Storm the Castle to be a very helpful website.  I loosely followed a recipe from there site to make my Cheap Easy Mead as well as when I decided to go big with my First 5 gallon Batch.  Reading through the site I was always intrigued by a recipe I had seen, Orange Spice Mead.  In keeping with my tendency to only partially follow recipes I tweaked it a bit but it looks good so far. The recipe for the orange spice mead was for one gallon I just multiplied everything to fit a bigger batch.

Batch Data:

Primary
Vessel
Sweetener
Type
Sweetener
Amount
Yeast
6 Gallon bucket Orange Blossom Honey 18 lbs. WYEAST Sweet Mead

Nutrient
used
Nutrient
Ingredients
Starter Fruit Used
Yes
  • 3/4 tsp Tannin
  • 1 tsp. Yeast Energizer
  • 3 tsp. Yeast Nutrient
Yes 1 can OJ concentrate

Starting Conditions:

Starting Gravity 1.019
Temperature 66 deg

I started by adding the honey to the bucket, then I dumped in the orange juice concentrate, still frozen.  I used a low acidity no sugar added orange juice.  The recipe called for 5 oranges with peel, seemed like a lot of work to me. This made an easy recipe easier then came all the spices.

Then I added the chemicals: Yeast Energizer, Yeast Nutrient & Pectic Enzyme. I broke it down so the one gallon

starter got some additives as well.  This was easy since all the additive bottles tell you what to use for 1 gal. After I mixed everything I filled the bucket with water.

I mixed everything up well and siphoned some of the must into a one gallon jug for the starter.  About 5 hours after I cracked the WYEAST Sweet Mead Yeast ACTIVATOR pack and it had shown signs of life I mixed it into the gallon jug.  The next day I added the starter to the batch and shook everything up oxygenating the must.

Pitch The Yeast!

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