Amy's Backyard Honey Mead aka Trilobite

Amy's Backyard Honey Mead
aka Trilobite

After a very long delinquent period of not posting I'm back.  Sorry for the delay but the last six weeks have been absolutely the busiest of my life, between work, home and vacation I've had zero extra time to do anything.  Part of being busy included another barrel brew on a 2 barrel brewsystem with one of my homebrew clubs Brewcommune.com, hosting a brewday for them, attempting to brew my annual imperial stout and hosting a brew demo at the shop.  This was followed by a trip out to Minnesota for work which included an overnight camp-out for Darkness Day 2012.  I've got lots of stuff to cover but let's get started with my second mead.

Back in mid-October my good friend Bryce came down from our hometown of SLC to LA with his girlfriend Amy.  She was in town at the last minute to take her Medical Licensing Examination Step 2. Besides bringing me an at least 250 million year old Trilobite (it could be up to 500 million years) they also brought with them 2 pounds of fresh honey that Amy had harvested from the bee hives she keeps in her back yards.  That's right from the bee hives she keeps in her backyard, how cool it that. 

I decided to use it to make a small batch of mead using the recipe for Joe's ancient orange mead as the recipe.  I've had mead from this recipe from several friends and it has produced some of my favorite meads.  I also had pretty much every ingredient on hand including fresh oranges from my CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) box.  Amy gave me 3 8oz by volume jars of honey which equated to 2 pounds by weight of honey. the standard Joe's recipe calls for 3 pounds of I scaled the recipe down based on the about of honey I had (2/3 of a gallon versus 1 gallon).

Close up for the trilobite they also brought

Violating probably a dozen unwritten rules about hosting a brewday I decide to use that time to keg up a bunch of beers, transfer some to secondary and clean everything that needed cleaning so pretty much I decided not to brew on a brewday. Like I said, it probably violated tons of unwritten rules. Not wanting to violate them all I decided that I would include making the mead on my to do list so I could at least say I made a fermented beverage.

The really nice thing about mead is how freaking fast it is to make. From warming the honey to clean up it probably took me less than an hour, probably less, almost all of it going to heating the honey to liquify it make it easier to work with. Now comes the waiting, currently it's hanging on in my kitchen for a few months as the bread yeast chews though the honey.  I have plans on when this will make it's debut but who knows when that will happen.

Cheers

-SNB

Pictures

Straight from the beehive state

Oranges, raisins and cinnamon

Cloves and yeast

Warning the honey

Prepping the oranges while
adding the honey

Everything added, just need to
shake the hell out of it

Everything combined