Homemade Blueberry Mead Recipe - Celebration Generation (2024)

FAQs

How many blueberries for 1 gallon of mead? ›

Here's a batch that I just finished. Let me do some math for a 1 gallon batch... I would use about 4 lbs of blueberries and 2 lbs of honey. Freeze and Thaw the berries a few times to make them super soft and 'pulpy', add them to your fermenter in a mesh bag.

Seal fermentor with airlock and store in a dark place at a temperature of about 70 degrees. After 2 weeks, with a siphon, re-rack the mead into a sanitized 5 gallon carboy. Add the 1 oz cascade leaf hops in a muslin bag to the secondary. After 1 weeks, re-rack, then let age for 3 months.

The blueberry mead I've made, I used ~12lbs/gallon, but that makes it more like a wine. If you're using whole fruit, you'll want to pull the berries after about a week or so. Otherwise you will wind up with a very tannic, bitter flavor.

Lalvin D-47

This white wine yeast is the primary choice for many mead makers. It ferments at a moderate to fast pace with little foaming and is good for medium to dry meads. It tends to accentuate the honey characteristics so it is a good choice for traditional varietal mead.

Secure the lid on the jar to create an airtight seal. Store the jar at room temperature, away from direct sunlight, and allow the blueberries to ferment for about 3-5 days. Check the jar daily and press down on the weight to release any trapped air bubbles.

Ultimately that turns out to about 0.825 lbs of berries per gallon and 1.5 lbs of honey per gallon. My gut feeling tells me this will be enough to generate a berry mead, but I could always add more honey. Here are some ratios coming to mind: 3.3lbs blueberries, 4 gallons water, 6lbs honey.

Historically, in a lot of the ancient mead making, they would start drinking it at this stage. Tej, for example, they'd just open ferment it, and over time it becomes less sweet and more alcoholic. If it's left in that open fermentation eventually it starts to become sour.

Consumers may age in the bottle. Commercially made meads are generally ready to be enjoyed when released. Interestingly, over 90% of meads and grape wines are made with immediate consumption (within a year) in mind, and approximately 1% are made with the intention of long-term (more than five years) aging.

Yes, mead improves with age. As mead sits aging in the bottle it will undergo a type of mellowing that will allow some of the subtle flavors to come forward while other less desirable flavors will retreat. It will still remain the same for the most part, but some flavors move forward while others retreat.

BLUEBERRY HAZE:​ This Semi-Sweet Mead pairs best with red meat, duck or venison dishes with dark gravy. Dark chocolate desserts or other berry deserts. TRAPPERS CASK RED: A nice big beef or venison steak would match up well with this Mead.

What fruit makes best mead? ›

Ken introduces his “Noble” fruits which he believes are the top fruits to use in meads including fruits like tart cherries, raspberries, currants and blackberries. We discuss how the acidity and tannins provide the flavor and structure needed for a large gravity mead with a substantial amount of residual sweetness.

In general, more yeast is actually better, at least at first. But you can, if you severely over-pitch, end up dosing your must with so many ravenously hungry yeast cells that they over compete for the sugar and nutrients, resulting in stressed yeast and resulting production of off flavors.

Prior to modern day cultivated yeast production, Vikings would have been limited to the wild yeasts that are found all over the environment.

Raw honey is an excellent choice for making mead, because it's totally unpasteurized, which means the honey has not been heated in any way. This allows the delicate flavor to remain intact, because it hasn't been destroyed by any kind of heating process.

A good starting point with most fruits is about 3 pounds of fruit per gallon of mead, though I have been known to use 5 or even 6 pounds of fruit. Fruit blends can produce some great-tasting meads.

About 5 pounds fit in a one gallon freezer bag and you can use them all winter on cereal or in blueberry recipes.

Place blueberries (fresh or frozen) into a mason jar or pitcher. You should add enough to fill 20 - 40% of the container. Fill the container with clean, filtered water. Place the container in the refrigerator and let it sit for at least 4 hours.

So, let's get into the particulars on how I make this Blueberry Wine Recipe. The first thing you will need is of course blueberries and a lot of them. 2 to 4 lbs of blueberries are needed per gallon of wine.