“Where asphalt ends, Motherland begins,” my wife said as we turned towards her village. Within a second, the car began to shake terribly, and Louise laughed. We are in Burzyan. I knew that this area is famous for wild honey and Kapova Cave, but somehow I was not particularly interested …
When we arrived to spend the night and sat chatting about life, I saw Artur Rinatovich stirring something in a flask. It turned out that Louise’s father makes mead. After tasting, I asked my father-in-law about the method of preparing such an unusual drink. To which he replied: “And I will teach you!”.
This story was sent to me by a subscriber from Ufa Alexey Sergeevich.
Why I wanted to learn how to make mead
First, I was driven by interest. It happens that you see how someone is sculpting clay pots, and you want to get dirty behind the potter’s wheel. I do not like to sit idle, I need to try something all the time, do something, fix it, etc. And what to do in the honey district itself, if not mead? So I thought.
Secondly, Artur Rinatovich did it so enthusiastically: he controlled everything, checked the amount of honey and sugar, squeezed out bee bread … but I will not immediately reveal all the secrets to the reader. In general, the father-in-law is still an advertiser, he managed to attract me to the case. In addition, he himself very much wanted to pass on his knowledge to me.
We have a lot of honey in our apartment, they send it to my wife and parents, and friends from the village. It seemed to me that it would be interesting to learn how to make the correct “Bal bali”, as the locals call mead, and try to cook it already in the city.
What ingredients are needed
The most important ingredient is honey. It can be different in taste and color, but it is important for us to use comb honey. Some bee colonies do not survive the winter and die, leaving their winter stocks almost intact. From such frames, honey is removed along with wax and is already added to mead.
Despite the fact that sugar is present in the recipe, it is comb honey, which contains bee bread, royal jelly and propolis, that gives mead its characteristic color and sweet taste.
Louise tastes the mead after the sugar has been added.
You can’t make mead without wheat. For a whole flask of drink, one bucket (10 l) of wheat grains, the most common ones that are fed to chickens, is enough.
A moment of humor: do not feed this to your birds later if you do not want to see drunk layers!
In order for cereals to start turning honey into alcohol, you need dough. It is undesirable to use yeast, they significantly change the traditional taste of the drink, giving it notes of cheap beer. The mother-in-law poured a liter jar of sourdough into the container, and this was enough for a long time.
You can’t do without honey alone – sometimes you will need to add sugar to mead to remove bitterness. During the fermentation process, it needs a lot of sugar, and if instead you get by with only honey, the drink will be sugary and oversaturated.
The cooking process
The first stage is preparation. First you need to thoroughly wash the flask or stainless steel container to get rid of foreign smells and tastes. Also rinse wheat grains several times with warm water.
I recommend making a bag for grains (ideal – sewn from a clean piece of tulle).
So, a bag of wheat, dough is already inside a clean flask. Now boil a lot of water. Boiled water should be cooled to room temperature and fill the flask, but not to the brim – remember, honey will still need to be put there.
Add the main ingredient – honeycomb. It is better to knead it in a bowl with your hands and mix it a little, so that you don’t suffer later, trying to squeeze everything out of the honeycombs to the last drop.
It is impossible to say exactly how much honey will go into the flask, you need to add and try – the water should become sweet enough.
We immediately distributed most of it to colleagues and friends, the rest was put in the freezer, as natural mead quickly ferments and deteriorates.
That’s all – now it remains to put the flask in a sunny and warm place (it’s not for nothing that mead is made only in summer), protect it from the cold, taste it from time to time and “feed” the dough with honey and sugar in time. You also need to sometimes squeeze bee bread from honeycombs floating on the surface.
Result
At first, I didn’t even believe that it would turn out to be really tasty mead. We all know that usually “the first pancake is lumpy.” But not at this time! Either I carefully memorized everything and tried, or the recipe is so easy and proven that it never fails.
But still, you should be careful and control the fermentation process in order to achieve the best result!
I realized one thing: everything can be adjusted in the process, you just need to try often and add the necessary ingredients. As a result, I got an alcoholic drink with a strength of 12-14 degrees. The mead was poured through a sieve and bottled. This beauty has gone with us to the city.
I am very glad that I found out about this wonderful recipe, there is nothing complicated in it, and what we get does not leave anyone indifferent. I wonder if there are those among you who have tried such mead? If yes, which option seems better: classic or mead prepared according to my recipe?