Geetings to all

Thanks to all replies re Alcohol Conversion. You've made sure I'll measure
the SG this year at the start! I've had several requests for 'my' mead
recipe...guess my enthusiasm shows and I think a lot of people really want
the lowest common denominator of simplicity...Eva Crane has written  "A Book
of Honey" ISBN 0 19 217657 9 Oxford University Press. The section on
alcoholic drinks states that exact instructions don't survive from early
times but she does give general guidelines that have.

So after reading her instructions, and those of Brother Adam, and putting
the books away (my personal study technique) I washed all my cappings and
crushed wild comb in a demi johns worth of bought spring water ( no way am I
drinking Thames valley rainwater!). I then added honey until the mixture
just floated a newly laid egg with a bit showing. This lovely smelling
mixture was brought to the boil. This year I'll filter out the pollen.

I added some yeast from our fridge (normal baking yeast) when it had cooled
enough, almost filled my clean demi john and put a loose 'cork' of cotton
wool in. It fermented heavily in our boiler cupboard for about a month. I
put a fermentation air lock instead of the cotton wool at about 2 months, at
which stage the mixture tasted vile.

At about 9months I put the demijohn outside, and some solids settled. I
siphoned the murky, woody tasting liquid off the sediment corked it and
shoved it in the cupboard under the sink, wondering if that was how those
romantic medieval types had drunk it. Yuk!

 Looking for a few extra jars under my sink I found a Demi john of crystal
clear dry sparkling mead, with a sediment at the bottom. I siphoned it off
again and the 'accidental' mouthfuls my wife and myself tasted prompted the
question to the list re alcohol content. In case we drink it all in one
sitting.

Re- reading Prof. Eva Crane sort of makes me wonder about a crash course in
chemistry. There's an awful lot of different sugars  in honey...and it
appears most of them ferment! I'm sorry moderators and you old hands who've
grown bored with these things we newbees find so miraculous. I'm sure there
are twenty better, more precise recipes in this list's archive and numerous
hours of study on the mead list. Apologies to those of you who got dashed
off personal replies too!

Thanks

John Sewell

(Got 10 hives, want 1000. Mongrel bees, 2yrs cumulative stings. Reading
England. Use drugs to save bees...but hate 'em.Trying to be a non-smoker)