This is my personal library of modern how-to-brew books for beer and mead.   Suggestions for additions are welcome; so are corrections.  I don’t have any surprises in here; experienced brewers will undoubtedly recognize all the titles and have a few of their own to add.  Schramm, Papazian, Acton and Douglas, [...]

I added flavoring and glycerin to a test batch of cordial for the first time ever this week.  I had split a batch of peach cordial made with lovely orchard peaches gathered last summer, soaked in white brandy.  It had a wonderful nose but very, shall we say, delicate flavor.  [...]

Proper yeast nutrition means your brew ferments faster and cleaner, leaving fewer off-flavors that have to age out.  We’ll call that a good thing.  Yeast is a pretty complex little organism, though, with a lot of nutrient requirements that change from life phase to life phase.  So how do we, [...]

Specific gravity, that magic number that allows us to easily figure how alcoholic our brews are, or are likely to be; how sweet they may be, and something about their anticipated mouthfeel…lots to think about, with gravity.  I am making the assumption that a swift, efficient fermentation is best for [...]

This is a class handout, and rather chatty.  You’ve been warned. Clarifiers  

 This is a basic mead recipe from a class I taught in 2009.  Now, I could not possibly break it down this simply, but thinking like this got me started and served me reasonably well for a lot of years.  Honey: 2.5 – 4 lbs per gallon of water. Water: [...]

A common flaw in meads is a poor balance between acid and sweetness. You need a little acid to offset the natural sweetness in mead.  Honey is not a high-acid substance to begin with, and is diluted with a lot of water. Adding acid will lower the pH level in your [...]

Honey contains small amounts of vitamins, minerals and amino acids, as well as anti-oxidants, but not enough to make sufficient nutrition for your yeast.  If there is lag time in getting yeast activity started in a mead must, it could be due to the lack of available nitrogen and nutrient compounds. Adding things [...]

Sulfite: the goal is to neutralize wild yeasts in your mead must, so that they don’t give you awful off-flavors.  Brewing yeasts are carefully engineered for the way they process the honey and nutrients in your must, which is how you can get lovely citrusy overtones or floral aromas just from fermentation.  [...]