About:
This is a wonderful warming Christmas fermented drink that is great to enjoy with family and friends during the festive season. It uses the classic festive spices of all spice, cinnamon, cloves and ginger. It will for sure put you in the Christmas spirit. It would make a lovely thoughtful gift too! In a previous post I wrote about summer mead with elderflower. The elderflower mead recipe fermented for a shorter period of time making it more light and fresh. Whilst this is a slightly longer ferment giving it a richer and more complex flavour with higher alcohol content. This is a great drink to enjoy warm but make sure you don’t warm it up too much as you’ll lose the alcohol content. You don’t need to add any yeast to this recipe as the yeast comes naturally from the honey. Yeast in honey is inactive until you raise the water content. Compared to lactic fermentation used in vegetable ferments, yeast respires aerobically meaning it uses oxygen.
Ingridients:
- Honey
- All Spice
- Ginger
- Cinnamon
- Cloves
- Clementine or Orange
- Water
Method:
Find a large mixing bowl to use to make your festive mead in. It’s advised to use a wide bowl as this will increase surface area to the air. Higher surface area means the yeast present in the honey can take up more oxygen. Start by mixing together water and honey to make the base. The honey should be unpasteurised and natural in order for inactive yeast to be present. I like to use roughly a ratio of 1/4 of honey/water. You may of course want it a little sweater and instead add even more honey. Add the all spice, ginger, cinnamon and cloves to the base. As with my other posts I recommend getting experimental. You may like your mead more with a ginger kick or a stronger cinnamon flavour so you could be more generous with either of these spices. Be more careful with how much cloves and all spice you add as they have a strong flavour. I used a powered ginger as I find it has more of a sweetness but fresh ginger would work fine. I used cinnamon powder but a stick of cinnamon would work well. Next step is to half the clementines or oranges if you’re using that and juice them. Add the juice to the mixture. You could add some zest to create even more citrus flavour. Now you’ve added all the ingredients to your bowl you can mix everything together. You’ll want to stir the mixture vigorously twice a day to oxygenate the yeast in the honey that will ferment the mead. Cover the bowl with a kitchen towel to prevent dust from falling in. After 3-5 days bubbles should start to appear. After 7 days, once the mixture has properly started to ferment, you can add the contents to a glass bottle. It’s important that you have some way of letting out the CO2 that builds up during fermentation otherwise the bottle will explode. I used a fermentation lock to allow CO2 to escape whilst preventing unwanted bacteria and dust from entering the bottle. You can buy a fermentation lock at any brewery shop. Allow the mead to ferment for 2-3 weeks. The longer you leave the bottle the more the yeast will consume the sugar in the honey and produce alcohol. If you want to enjoy your mead fizzy you can seal the bottle and leave it for 24 hours and then refrigerate. CO2 will build up in the sealed bottle and make the mead fizz.
Creative Fermentation 