It’s going to be a tough year for cherry melomels, cherry wheat beer, cherry lambic, and (sob!) cherry pie. I have a cherry mel in secondary that needs a boost.  It’s a bit thin, and the cherry flavor could be better.  Of course, it’s January – not a fresh cherry [...]

This is a recipe in progress for a sparkling ginger mead.  I’m adding all my thought processes and decisions here.  I’m making it for my friend Cynthia, unless she tells me she doesn’t like ginger… Sanitize EVERYTHING, except the spice bag, which doesn’t sanitize well so I boil it.  Spatula, [...]

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’ve been preparing my list of historical brewing sources.   I am chagrined each time I see a post from a newbie on one of the brewing history forums, asking whether there are period sources.  You bet there are!  Clearly my eleven-page bibliography needs to become a searchable database available from [...]

This has taken two silver medals so far this season (Merrimack valley Homebrew Competition and Meadlennium in Florida) and just helped me win the coveted title at the SCA event known as the Baronial Brewers Smackdown at Highland Foorde’s Highland River Melees.  I wrote this rather hurriedly, and I’m afraid it shows. The Recipe Started August [...]

What shall I call my very first cyser,  in primary this very morning?  I used a recipe that took a gold in last year’s AHA competition which sounded particularly appealing – 18 lbs of pretty solid buckwheat honey, lots of apple juice, raisins, oak chips soaked in Jack Daniels  The [...]

This is a couple of years old, and very chatty, but I apparently used it as a class handout some time ago.  I do a number of things differently now, but this might still be useful…it’s copyrighted, folks. Elspeth Payne Class Handout A plug for varietals (different kinds of honey), [...]

This is an example of retroengineering to create competition documentation.  I don’t recommend it.  It’s true that when I created this recipe, which has always done well in competition, I took historical recipes into consideration.  I did not, however, take notes.  Back then I didn’t even keep a notebook.  When [...]

 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: [...]