welcome to a na backyard gardening today we're going to show you how to make Mead so before we get to that though wanted to show you what I've done with my raised bed to keep Kona out of the garden so today I wanted to plant all my vegetables for my winter garden but I was a little nervous that as soon as I planted all these Kona would show up and dig them all up again so what I did is I put up a two-foot fence around the raised bed but I didn't wrap it all the way around I left these gaps in between the posts so that hopefully I can come up to my garden pull a post out and be able to work in the garden without too much trouble so I'm hoping the idea of the fence deters Kona more over than the dirtiness of it if it is pretty easy to remove but we'll see how it goes in the meantime I printed some romaine lettuce some red and green cabbage and cleaned out some nice Tomatoes I was just about to rip out my roma tomato when I noticed that it is buddy again so it seems like once the yellow pair was gone the cherry was dying off this guy finally decided to explode listen new growth and maybe even some new Tomatoes this lightly season so we'll see so today we're gonna make some Mead let's get started I live in America you know you're gonna need like a pose go ahead and stand you guys anyways just for good measure in case and the key is here that they have to sit in the star fan for at least 10 minutes right yeah something like that I think it's only two minutes that's a little off plan for the hosts this turkey baster it's so and that's all we need I got this one that's probably only got like a pound left in it I'm gonna set it on its side so I can start moving towards the top and we're gonna use up that one you got another one of these three pounds go into each batch so we're going to try and do three batches today I got enough honey and I think we're gonna run out of water first and you're gonna need some distilled water so I gotta the same thing I've been doing some patches so just got small I've distilled water but I think it's still been a little hot by us I've been using this white red start Premiere Blanc yeast that's good up to 86 degrees before it'll die so if we get a heat stuff I'd still be all right with that stuff some other time I want to do the white labs sweet means that wap-7 20 but this one only goes up to like 70 it's a yeah it goes up to 78 before it dies so I'm gonna save that for the winter so we keep a journal of all the home brews that we make so Phil's looking back to some of the previous new recipes that we've done to see what his notes were but it's really convenient because as you go through the process you have to make modifications some time and when you look back on the next home brew and you want to make this either the same modification or keep yourself from making the same mistake then it's helpful to have a record of what you did so I'm just gonna put this on here tear it out and start adding our honey all right from my notes last time I used 3.6 pounds so I'm just gonna go ahead and get into that it's about as fast as honey years but not as slow as molasses some train have to touch the rim because I don't know what's on the bottle I should be able to get out it's pretty close and don't I call that just lay it down they move a bit more this you know bring it up to like three point I think the recipe I'm using actually calls for 3.5 oops ever shot I think that's I did it last time that one down is it nine three right I'm gonna start putting in my water just bring it up what are you doing with the drill so you got to mix all this I used to either shake it up or stir it but then I found out you can use these pinks burgers just in there sanitize it first that's the key [Applause] and then I usually go for a couple minutes because if you incorporate oxygen into there then the yeast will be happier and it'll form a group so I'll just go so I'm just gonna cover it up real quick I'll put a note on it that is number one so that's one down so we're gonna go quickly through the next two that we're doing and then show you how to add the yeast at the end so there you have it means three four and five so we've made two meats previously with flavoured one as a strawberry mead and one as an orange Mead so to keep our record straight we're doing three four and five and next we're going to show you guys how to add the yeast to these mixtures I just want to point out here we took Kona to training so even though we say things like Kona destroyed the garden or Kona is not behaving we've done training with him he's just very stubborn look at this floating thermometer why do you need the thermometer to activate the yeast you have to get this water to like the perfect temperature so we're going to measure that and make sure it's all good yeah we're at 160 that's safe okay we'll give that a minute to cool down so what is this this is a refractometer that does the same thing as here what do you call that thing hydrometer the hydrometer yeah except you'll need like a dropper to of your sample instead of a whole test tube which will really help because we're only doing one John batches I wonder I think you can see it you're just gonna get really bright light put it in here the levels a potential alcohol content all right drain it the sugar content the specific gravity with respect to water once you know it there it is okay so really hard to see but what will happen is that a blue line will creep up this once he actually put a sample in it and then that way would you read the specific gravity of the sample pretty easily Kona you're on a cookie 101 and I bet you by the time I get the when I said we using this red star Mir Blanc white wine yeast that wants to be at 95 to 100 degrees and it says one of these will do five gallons but I've always done because I don't like doing the math like weighing about by grams I just do a half of one per gallon so I'm gonna go ahead and throw one of these in there actually I should be able to just do that right because it does five gallons so it's been about 20 minutes and I ended up putting like a drop or two of honey in there and we're starting to get bubbles that form we're on our own from the yeast so I think we're ready to put that batches third smell start with number three visions music see ya I'm just dispersing I can't get it on the camera but you could definitely tell I probably infected it yeah oh yeah you can't see it that's really cool all right they shouldn't need a mix third batch number three first test batch number three couple jabs then oh man but off the charts what they're eating 1.35 is that's way out there let's see if I can grab it on the camera yeah you can see that pretty well so it is almost off the charts which is pretty cool maybe we can convert the scale on the left let's add about 30.9 bricks so let's see what that converts over into okay there's a line on the airlock that indicates how high the water ought to be yeah nice sanitized and that's it we're going to put airlocks on the rest of the batch s here and set it in a cool dark place for what about a week so we'll check the specific gravity as we get closer to a week or two weeks see if it reaches our target specific gravity and that'll tell us how much alcohol content there will be but otherwise we'll go into a secondary fermentation after that and that will be the flavor of the Meads so it could be anything from like a strawberry mean to blueberry or we've done orange in the past or cinnamon even there's a wide range of options but we'll give you an update once these are ready and hopefully this really helped you to understand how easy making your own batch of me can really be so hit the like and subscribe buttons below and we'll see you guys in the next video