hi its will from stormthecastle.com and here on youtube you know me as epic clarity and this is my latest tutorial this is a lead making video I haven't done one in a while so I thought I'd do one because it happened something some good information to share with you this video is how do you get more fruit flavor out of your need no means a little bit tricky you can put fruit in there and let it sit and ferment for weeks and at the end of it all all said and done you get just a hint of fruit oh that's funny thing because you're not cooking it it's kind of just soaking so I'm here in this video I have a series of really good tips on how to get more flavor out of your fruit when you're making Mead dioramas origami catapults where whites are trees and paper games swords and shields and real blacksmithing model rockets animation i teach the art of real creation throw me kappa doctor that makes something alright so let's take a look i'm going to use three pounds of honey for this and these are each 24 ounces which is a pound and a half net weight that's a thing you know sometimes it's confusing liquid volume and net weight but the net weight here is one and a half pounds sixteen ounces per pound so i have three pounds and wanted to show you when you're making a fruit flavored meter ml ml right it's preferable that you use something called clover honey and there's a lot of different types of honey and they're all very wonderful and they all have their characteristics and a mold very common honey is wildflower honey and the beaze harvest from a whole variety of different types of you know plants and flowers for wildflower but clover honey it's they only there's a certain percentage that they use just clover and what that does is that makes a very light color the honey and if ever you're light flavored honey and we want to like save it honey we want to clover honey for using fruit so we get more of the flavor and less of the honey flavor so if you can go with the clover honey and let me just give you a couple more tips here notice this one here it's unpasteurized 100% all-natural pure raw honey unpasteurized and unfiltered so armed so look at those things if you can the unpasteurized the raw honey on unfiltered that's just the pure form of honey for a better Mead because you know honey just like anything else can be processed a lot and you lose flavors from it so so that's it when it comes to the honey three pounds of honey per gallon and if you can use clover honey and try to get unprocessed unpasteurized raw honey okay take your fruit and at the end of this process we want to end up with a pound of your fruit so you're going to put you should buy more than a pound because it going to have they're going to be scrapped you're going to throw out two bits cut it up into small pieces and be as liberal as you want you can even dice it if you wanted you what you're going to be able to get it into the jug of the bottle of the the one gallon jug you want to be able to fit it all in there easily and you don't see it here in this clip but I'm cut against the grain you want to release as much flavor as possible and cutting at your Instagram does that so don't be easy with the fruit and then take your take a pound of cut fruit and put it in plastic freezer bags and that means put it in the freezer so what happens is is will unfreeze it overnight so you'll think it's nice approach what happens there is that the molecules are actually ruptured the freezing process causes crystals that cut the the cells and break it all open and which is great in that reduces flavor and then you know once it's all frozen and you're ready to make your mead now it's time with today we're making on meat either use a rolling pin on or some kind of a mallet or something and break it up even further to two reasons you're breaking it up so it's easier to handle and get into the jug and also to further break up the the molecules so they release their flavor now I was pretty rough on there's a freezer bag so and also you'll see why in a second put the fruit in new freezer bags that don't have content or holes or rips in them and you know you could come up another way to do this but this is just you know you watch this whole video you get a pretty good understanding of what to do so now we're going to heat up some water and get yourself a big kind of water like this and I'm not sure how much check that on there but half a gallon of water roughly three quarts maybe and we're going to do a couple of things with that pan of water first we are going to do something called activating the yeast and I am using lav and K 1 V 1 1 1 6 yeast and always check the expiration date in the east and and it usually comes with directions on how to activate it like that and I'm using the K 1 V 1 1 6 and I recommend it for this because it's a very aggressive yeast it starts out it gets off to a really good start when fermenting and I'll explain a little bit more about why we want to do that but yeast is dried it's and it's dormant and we want to activate it and we do that in the case of this yeast by heating up some water between 104 and 109 degrees those are the directions that came with the yeast we take about a half a cup of it so it's warm water not hot and we add a yeast to it and then gently stir it and then we can set this aside so that's how we're activating our yeast there it's going to book it up it's kind of like taking it takes it out of its dormancy and brings it back to life before we pitch it into our Mead so now this is why we had such a big cam up hand and this is why we put the strawberries in new plastic bags so lower the heat on that nice and low and put your honey and your bags of fruit in the water we want to warm up the honey so it's very easy to pour and slow see and now pour it in your one gallon jug pour it all all three pounds of it which is adds up to be three pounds of just about a quart so and the reason for the heating of the honey isn't pasteurization or anything like that we want to make it easy to flow easy to handle we wanted to mix easily with the water so now pour your spring pour spring water in your jug - around half-full doesn't matter too much after three quarters full you need to leave room for your fruit that's the thing and then shake it up vigorously keep shaking and shake it some more we want the mixture of honey in water to be homogeneous if it doesn't mix well you could get something called stratification we're late around the honey and the water separate so mix it up really well shake it shake it shake it and shake it some more and then add your fruit and you know do it any way you want you can just go ahead and put the pieces in the jug directly or use a funnel like I'll show you right here use a funnel and kind of mash it through and get it in there there we go so now you see why we only filled it half with water just so we have enough room for our fruit and now top it off with more spring water and I want to take the order to show you something here well we want to get it pretty full like this is okay that space there that amount of space and I'm going to actually add a little bit more water but the big thing is the more water the better but the big thing is is when it starts fermenting especially with fruit in it it's possible for it to bumble up and make a mess and clog up your airlock so you do want to leave some airspace up there kind of so the fruit and the bubbles and everything will settle not get indeed stuck in your airlock and then let me show you so you've added your fruit your water everything's good the honey everything's good shake it up again mix it up and we're looking for no stratification right you don't want to see any separation of honey in water at this point you can be bigger very still be very vigorous with it that's okay it will help to further release the flavor of the fruit so now it's been 15 to 20 minutes or so since we activated our yeast and you can see although in this video you can't see it too well the yeast is starting to get this activity happening there's a bubbling and there's fizzling small amounts of fizzling and puzzling but a bubbling that means the yeast is coming alive so now we do something called pitching yet pitch that yeast into your jug and that's it you have made me a little bit more now gently and don't be rough with it just gently stir it around just to distribute the yeast around in the jug fill your airlock a filled with water and put it on top and that's that now set that container in a dark place stay away from sunlight and keep it at room temperature and that's it so now we've learned some things it's the food process the whole thing you can use a fermentation pail like I have here what's at a two gallon fermentation veil which is great for fruits put them I use the jug because I wanted to keep an eye on things I wanted to show you how it all looked will be able to monitor its progress as it goes Oh we've made our Mead and now if you want to go on further with this right you know there's more to be done like racking and it did two weeks you would rack it into a new container and then further down the line your bottle I have more videos at the end of it this video I'll show you those videos so you can ruin the whole process of mead making if you want to this video is just all of our getting clave ready read let me review first off use a clover honey because it's milder and gentler it won't clash as much or overpower the flavor of the fruit that you choose second get a few into small pieces and be conscious of drinking open the cells going against the grain to release as much flavor as you can that's that's the point of the cutting and then it's more or less in the drug if you're not using it fermentation panel please freeze the fruit put it in the freezer freeze it right up because what happens is it causes ice crystals that rupture the cells in the fruit and releases all that flavor and put the fruit in right away which is something I generally don't advocate I usually like to add fruit to Mead two weeks later because it's let me describe it because it's safer for this particularly for beginners what happens is when you start fermenting mead with no fruit it builds up alcohol and alcohol is discourages bacteria grow unwanted bacteria so if you let it ferment and get a certain percentage of alcohol for a couple of weeks when you put the fruit in there you have very little risk of contamination the alcohol is like an antiseptic could kill it will kill any wild yeasts but on in the case of how we combat that in the case of this mead when we put the fruit in right away we combat that by using Loudon k1o G what's a kv-1 let me look I use the Rao in yeast that arm is very aggressive gets off to a very fast start so the yeast takes over quicker than any wild or unwanted bacteria K would be one one that say I'm trying to think yeast and you know that's optional but that's how I combat adding the fruit better okay so a couple more things we're going to take a look at this batch for hours and 12 hours later I thought you might like to see that and also I wanted to speak to one more thing and that's pectin pectin is like this it's kind of like a polymer almost it's it's kind of like a gel and it's actually used to make gelatin and it comes in in fruits some fruits have a lot of it some fruits have a small amount apples and pears and plums have oranges have a lot of pectin and strawberries in grapes only in cherries only have a little bit of pectin but it can cause cloudiness in you need so if you want to clear up your media having trouble clearing up your meat over course of time you might want to consider something called a Peck tic enzyme it's really inexpensive you just add it to the mead I probably won't need it in this batch but let's take a look four hours later remember I was talking about how we need some headspace in the top of that jug because of overflow well there you go and four hours later I checked on it and it did overflow so I took the airlock off tried to clear the airway right see it look at the buzz but bubbling and fizzling is that great and and and then I washed and cleaned that airlock and put it back on and I actually did this process one more time a few hours later and I drained a little bit of fluid out of the jug because it still seemed to keep clogging and that's okay but let's take a look so here you go is that cleaned airlock put back on so monitoring particularly within the first 24 hours and because you may get that it's just kind of going to happen the jug the fruits clog things up and you end up it ends up coughing up stuff into the airlock and so let's take a look 12 hours later after I had cleaned it one more time and drained a little bit of fluid out of it and there we go but it looks really good there's no stratification everything looks clean and nice it's bubbling very nicely and that laven yeast is off to a great start 12 hours later we already get some bubbling like every once every but I think that's like seven or eight seconds but that'll get really aggressive thanks for watching last more me making stuff on my website strongly Castle calm and here in my youtube channel I have a playlist with all my mead making videos if you're going to make some meat have some fun with it and send me pictures love to hear about it thanks for watching that video I hope you enjoyed it if you're a subscriber thanks for subscribing to my channel if you're not a subscriber hit that button I always have lots of fun and interesting and very creative projects i do two new ones every week as an example here's a couple more videos you might want to watch