Ask the Meadmaker – Join the Feast

We finally launched our Drink Your Values project! I've been working on it for half a year and been hinting at it off and on. You should go check it out now if you haven't already. drinkyourvalues.groennfell.com. I'll wait.

Welcome to Ask the Meadmaker, where I, Ricky the Meadmaker, answer your questions about mead making, mead drinking, mead brewing, and really any question you're willing to send me.

Our first question comes from John, who is a night watchman at some power plant or something in Oklahoma and he uses these episodes to break up the boredom, which sounds unsafe. But anyway, his question is one of the good old fashioned “I made a mead. It was gross. I poured most of it out.” (Also, how do you guys pour out most of it? Like, I've always poured out all or nothing of something.) But anyway, he poured out about half of it, then he tasted it again, and it was definitely better. The problem is, he's an old man, and he's not sure he's going to live long enough for it to taste good. So, I guess he had a bunch of questions about using purees and speeding up fermentations. And I just wanted to get out here in front of this thing, because now I'm worried that if I didn't at least respond and say “Thank you for watching this John,” John wouldn't live long enough to see me answer his question on this episode. 

Unfortunately, he didn't have much of a question other than "Should I keep waiting?" Wait as long as you can, man. John did send a follow up email a couple days later. So I still don't know if he's alive or not. But he wants to know about using bee pollen as a nutrient and it has been done but it's not as effective as some other things. 

William wants me to talk about Auto Brewery Syndrome. Auto Brewery Syndrome is a condition in which your gut starts fermenting sugars and making alcohol for you. Now, he just asked me to talk about it, but I'm gonna put my two cents in here. I'm pretty certain it's not the best way to get alcohol into your body only because of off gassing. 

Here's one we haven't gotten before. Bill is using multiple strains of yeast in his mead, three different strains. And he wanted to know if they will breed with each other. And the answer is I'm pretty certain they won't. But he's also concerned that one will just win. And the answer to that is, what does winning mean to you? 

Our last question this week comes from MB and he is worried about sanitizing his ginger powder before sending it in and he doesn't want to boil it because that will take some of the flavor away or at least change the flavor. So, should he soak it in vodka first? And the community responded exactly as I would which is, we don't sanitize ours and we've never had a problem. The best advice I can give you is if you are going to be packaging it, put the ginger in, let it sit for a couple days at room temperature so that if there is additional fermentation, it will happen while you have an airlock, just sayin'. And then after that, I don't know, sulfite and sorbate it if you're worried. 

That was our last question this week. Keep sending them I'll get to them as soon as possible. Cheers.