The plan for the video series is to focus on “mead made simple”, in small quantities, using only ingredients, supplies, and equipment, that you can find at your local grocery store. This way, you can try making mead, without investing a lot of time, space, or money on things only obtainable via mail-order or at a homebrew shop. Some of you might not even have a homebrew shop nearby, or even the practical ability to receive things by mail order.
Episodes planned so far include:
- An introduction to the whole series
- Plain mead (usually mis-named “traditional”), probably with orange blossom
- Plain mead with a different kind of honey, probably buckwheat
- Plain mead with a little less honey
- Plain mead with a little more honey (maybe at the same time as less?)
- Plain mead with more honey than that, by step-feeding
- Spiced mead (“methglyn”), probably clover honey with cinnamon in secondary
- Using apple juice instead of water (“cyser”)
- Spicing that to make “apple pie mead”
- Using grape juice (“pyment”)
- Using actual fruit instead of juice (“melomel”), probably blackberries
- Adding more fruit after fermentation, probably blackberries again
- Sima
- With maple syrup (acerglyn)
- With coffee (coffeeamel)
- With hot peppers (capsicumel/capsumel) – possibly trying sliced jalapenos, crushed red pepper, and other ways
- Using tea for tannins
- Making a tea of herbs or spices, to flavor mead indirectly
- Fermenting without deliberately adding yeast (“wild ferment”)
- Maybe mead with partly caramelized honey (“bochet”)
- Feel free to suggest more!
Most episodes will actually be split into multiple videos, trying to keep them under about five minutes each (for modern short attention spans):
- Just showing how it’s done
- What a modern hobbyist would do differently
- What a person in “olde tymes” would have done differently
- Any relevant history
- Any relevant science
- Added later, relevant Q&A, if you send relevant questions
And there may be also some general Q&A videos.