Making Mead

Wedding season is coming up. My wife and I have four weddings we'll be attending this summer, three of which are happening here on O'ahu, and going to weddings usually involves giving a wedding gift. I'm not especially excited about picking an item off a Williams Sonoma registry--seems sort of impersonal to me, you know?--so I've decided to give the newlyweds a gift of homebrewed mead instead.

You see, mead is a drink traditionally associated with weddings. The term honeymoon even relates to it. In olden days, after the wedding ceremony the couple would go into isolation for the period of a lunar cycle (which *cough cough* just happens to roughly coincide with a woman's menstrual cycle). During that time they'd drink mead and work on producing a male heir. The isolation was to help insure that the heir was the true sire of the husband. The mead was to inspire them in their work, and to increase the chance of the fruit of that work being male (mead can affect the PH of the body, and the PH of the woman's body during conception apparently affects the gender of the child conceived).

Anyway, heir or no, honeymoon or no, mead can be a pretty wonderful drink. I've been thinking about it more seriously recently because, as opposed to beer, the ingredients for mead can be entirely produced in Hawaii.

See, beer consists of barley, hops, water and yeast. The barley and hops don't grow well in Hawaii--they've developed in regions of greater latitude, which offer more sunlight hours in the summertime (in Hawaii we get like 13 hours of sunlight in the summer; in Washington state they get 16). But mead is mainly honey, water, and yeast. And honey is locally produced pretty much anywhere that plants grow, including Hawaii.

Another benefit to brewing mead in Hawaii is that the yeasts normally used in mead fermentation are often more tolerant of higher temperatures, whereas beer yeasts usually like it to be cooler. Dealing with Hawaii's warm temperatures has been a constant struggle for my brewing here. I've resorted to swamp-coolers and a cooler bag, and I've experimented with different yeast strains, all to minimize off-flavors produced by hot fermentations. The best luck I've had resulted from using more heat-tolerant yeasts.

So, for all of these reasons, I've decided to give mead-making another try (I did a batch back in San Fran that turned out pretty good, but I never got back to it till now.) Last month I got my hands on nine pounds of Organic, locally-sourced (Big Island) honey from Wililaiki Blossom nectar, and turned it into a mead. My plan is to bottle it next month, and then to give a bottle to each of the newly married couples with a recommendation to wait to open the bottle until at least their first year anniversary (which doesn't go along with the traditional honeymoon idea, but hey--my experience with mead leads me to believe that the longer the aging process, the better). Of course, I'll have plenty of bottles saved for myself, and I'll be sure to post how they turn out.