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 |
|
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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