I've been wanting to make a ginger mead for months. In a brief deviation from the Monty Python naming scheme, I'm dedicating this one to the most important ginger in my life, my little idiot cat, Alipher. The recipe is extremely loosely based on Charie Papazian's Barkshack Sparkling Ginger Mead.

Ingredients in this batch

  • 1.5 oz fresh, peeled ginger, finely grated on a Microplane
  • 3 lbs of Trader Joe's mesquite honey
  • ½ tsp yeast nutrient
  • ½ tsp yeast energizer
  • ⅓ pack of Lalvin K1V-1116, rehydrated in 2 oz of 100-degree water
  • Another 1 oz fresh, peeled ginger, finely grated on a microplane, added 26 Jan 2017.

Yield: Aces, another 1-gallon batch!

Instructions

I boiled the honey and ginger with approximately 0.4 gallons of distilled water for 15 minutes. I added this must, yeast energizer, and yeast nutrient to a sanitized glass carboy, then topped it off with more distilled water to the 1-gallon line. As usual, I aerated for approximately 10 minutes by capping, shaking, and uncapping the carboy repeatedly. Pitched the yeast and done. Starting gravity was 1.115.

Observations

  • 2016-12-26T16:00:00: The ginger began settling out on day 1. By the time I got around to writing this up two weeks later, a huge amount of yeast had settled out at the bottom, and the mead was still fermenting slowly.
  • 2017-01-29T16:00:00: I bottled this mead after six weeks, with a final gravity of 0.998 for a calculated ABV of 15.36%. The total yield was eight 12-oz bottles and one 500-mL bottle. Maybe it's just my love for ginger coming through, but this one was immediately totally drinkable. I look forward to seeing how it ages, although I'm not sure it'll last all that long.