hey everybody how's it going today I'm going to show you how to make Mead Mead is fermented honey and it's an alcoholic beverage it goes back thousands of years now I'm gonna be working with honey residue left over from extracting honey from some wax from my beehives if you don't have access to beekeeping equipment and those spent honey combs or the residue of honey all over them then you can still make Mead really easily just measure out two and a half pounds of honey per gallon of Mead follow the directions and the rest of this video don't worry about hydrometer readings or anything like that and you'll be fine back to the extractor I actually modified this extractor so that i'll put wire mesh inside this basket and I've got my crushed up wax honeycomb and it contains honey obviously and then I spin it under a pretty high speed and pull this out see that the honey would drain down there and then out the gate the first thing I'm gonna do with warm water and now I'm just gonna slowly pour that warm water about two gallons over all of this frame most of it would probably come up and get resolved with the first rinsing now I'm gonna open up the honey gate and all that warm water where the dissolved honey's gonna come out I've also got my sibs mic filters where I ran the honey through and I'm just gonna dissolve all that honey off to look at all that unclaimed cutting and now what I'm gonna do is take all of that crushed Berk home most of the honey's been extracted and I'm just gonna put it right in that pot of warm water and we'll separate the wax out later I just want to get every last molecule of honey that I can off of the spent lakhs and then of course the wax I'll use for beeswax candles and for other projects now what I'm doing is I'm just squeezing the wax in that big pot of warm water trying to get out every last a little bit of honey water and then I'm recycling this wax in my wax bucket you know have lots of uses for beeswax next I'm gonna strain out all those little tiny pieces of wax back into the original bucket and now after I cleaned out my pan I'm gonna dump that honey water back into it and now comes some of the sciency content what I want to do is take a sample of my honey water and put it in this hydrometer jar it's basically just a tube a vertical tube that'll hold some liquid okay here's my honey water in the hydrometer jar now I'm gonna submerse my hydrometer in it and a hydrometer is simply a tool to measure how much sugar is in solution or more specifically the specific gravity now our ballpark beginning number should be one point one zero zero I'm at one point one two so it actually has too much sugar I'm gonna reduce the amount of sugar by adding some water here I'm gonna start by adding a quart of warm water and then stir it together and take another hydrometer reading and keep doing that until it gets down to one point one zero zero if you look right here where my fingers pointing you can see that we're a little higher than one point one zero zero so I'm still gonna add some more water all right we're at one point one zero zero on the hydrometer reading you can get these hydrometers by the way in a wine making or a beer brewing supply company now I'm gonna turn on the stove and I'm gonna bring this to a gentle simmer not a boil just a simmer and that's to kill any of the bacteria that have contaminated this since we've been processing it now that I've got it to a simmer with just a little bit of steam escaping I'm gonna keep it covered turn the heat off and just let it sit for maybe an hour so until it comes down to just warmer than room temperature and what's gonna happen in that period of time is that that temperature is actually a pasteurization temperature and it will kill most of the bacteria that could cause food spoilage or compete with the east for the for the honey solution so we'll come back when this cools down and we'll start up fermenting the meat solution cool so I'm gonna pour it into my final bucket now I'm ready to pitch the yeast that simply means cutting open the yeast basket and dumping it into the honey solution now this isn't just baker's yeast this is actually a winemaking yeast this variety is called Montrachet says active dry wine yeast again you can get this online or in town and a winemaking or a beer making supply company store this bucket is now going to be the fermenter the lid of this bucket has a hole drilled through it with an o-ring and that's gonna hold the airlock I'll show you that in just a minute but we want to stir the east into the solution get it all nice and homogenized three there and then put the lid on securely you want to make sure it's a nice airtight lid and now for the airlock this is a plastic airlock modeled after the same types of airlocks that they used in the 1800's like with Louis Pasteur doing his studies and basically you fill it with water and in equilibrates of these lines you put this little cap off and then you stick this open end into the hole through the ball ring and what will happen over time is as the gas produced by the yeast comes up here it will push the water down this whole water column will rise in fact you can see it's rising already and it will bubble so it's releasing the carbon dioxide produced by the yeast and it's keeping oxygen from coming into the solution oxygen is actually a poison for fermentation we're just keeping it at room temperature not too hot not too cold it's been a few days since I put this Mead this fermenting honey into this big fermenter the primary fermenter and the bubbling has mostly stopped so what I'm gonna do now is transfer it into glass bottles called carboys for a final or secondary fermentation and I'll equip each one of these gallon glass jugs with one of these airlocks fitted through a rubber cork there's some gas escaping from this carboy of fermenting mead you can see all those gas bubbles that's carbon dioxide being released as the yeast ferment the honey into alcohol and you basically have to be patient at this point and over time it will get clearer and clearer this is one that I started last fall and it's probably still got a few months to go when it gets clear and when it stops bubbling go ahead and have a taste probably an alcohol content of about 10 to 14 percent after a long period of waiting here's the finished product this delicious Mead if you want to know what it tastes like mmm tastes like a Chardonnay with more floral notes and definitely a deep honey tone very good thank you bees