Our lovely friends at the Apiary Ciderworks and Meadery recently released a gorgeous elderberry mead: deep red, tannic, and tart. This mead is my first stab at the concept, though I've never used elderberries in my life and still need to do a bit of research while this sits in primary.

Ingredients in this batch

  • 2.5 lbs of Kirkland clover honey
  • 8 oz of dried elderberries, added in secondary
  • 1.5 tsp yeast nutrient
  • ½ tsp yeast energizer
  • ½ pack of Lalvin 71B-1122</a>, rehydrated in 100-degree water for 20 minutes

Yield:

  • 8 x 12 oz. beer bottles

Total: 96 oz, or ¾ gallon.

Instructions

I added the honey, yeast energizer, and yeast nutrient to a sanitized glass carboy, topped it off with filtered water to the 1-gallon line, then aerated for approximately 10 minutes by capping, shaking, and uncapping the carboy repeatedly. Pitched the yeast and done. Starting gravity was 1.092 at room temp. When racking into secondary on Dec 4, gravity measured at 0.998 at 63 degrees, and the mead was sparkling lightly.

Observations

  • 2016-11-21T22:00:00: The mead has been fermenting actively and gotten quite yeasty. I plan to rack into secondary and add the elderberries in another two or three weeks.
  • 2016-12-04T22:00:00: On December 4, we racked the mead into secondary and added 8 ounces of dried elderberries from the homebrew store. (Note to self: Dried elderberries are not delicious.) At this point, the mead was quite dry and lightly carbonated. The berries immediately began to turn the liquid a dramatic purple, and by the next morning, the mead was basically black. My reading suggests that there's such a thing as too much elderberry, so I plan to remove these after a week or so.