One day, I was driving by the local Asian market, Super Cao Nguyen. Thinking of the breadth of various fruits and herbs that can always be found in the market, I stopped in and began hunting for session mead ingredients. I knew I had Citra hops in the freezer at home — and I wanted something that would pair well with those. I chose lemongrass, orange peel, and ginger. When…
Rather than juice individual lemons by hand, Anna prefers to peel and pulse them in the food processor! Check out her quick guide to making rich, citrusy lemonade in minutes.…
I know what this sounds like, but I promise you’ll be pleased you tried it. Skeeter Pee is a now-infamous recipe for fermenting lemonade. You’ll need some granulated sugar and three big bottles of lemon juice. Skeeter Pee uses the remaining slurry from an existing batch of wine or mead. So, for example, if you’ve just racked off your apple cider and have a yeast cake sitting in the bottom…
Fruit can be expensive. Exotic fruits even more so – gooseberries, dates, and elderberries can all set you back a pretty penny. Enter jam wine. It’s exactly as it sounds – wine made from jam. Use about four pounds of jam per gallon of water. Your gravity reading may be a little bit off from all the pectin in the jam, so don’t worry about getting too scientific with this…
In this first video of a multipart series, we’re going to make both sparkling cider for summertime and applejack for winter. Bonus – applejack makes the perfect apple pie: Alton Brown approved! In this video we’ll brew up the basic recipes and talk a lot about process and basic science of yeast’s natural selection. Subsequent videos will feature the bottling and conditioning of the sparkling cider and the fractional distillation…
In regular Doin’ the Most fashion, we make turkey in a somewhat unconventional way. This deconstructed bird cooks faster and better than a whole bird. It’s beautiful on the platter and convenient for sandwiches! While it will require a couple of days of brining time, the wait is worth it. Turkey is tough to do right. Brining really is the key to getting a juicy, flavorful bird. Turkey is a…
This Irish-inspired take on mead is not green! Rather, it uses barley, heather tips, and elderflowers to create something truly unique and unusual. This is the first video in a series — we will also rack, fine, and bottle condition this mead. Part Two Video:…
Recently, on a trip to the super mercado, we stumbled upon Honey Bee Liquid in the honey section. Clearly not honey, we began to wonder what would happen if we fermented it into “not mead.” And so we did. Using EC-1118 we turned this sickly sweet fake honey into an even worse concoction. Laced with alcohol and still disgustingly cloying, the final product was not worth the $20+ we invested…
Making homemade mayonnaise is super easy and the science is super interesting. Egg yolks and mustard contain emulsifying agents. Check out this Wikipedia article to learn more about what that means. For eggs, it has to do with the protein in the yolks. We decided to experiment with using duck eggs instead of chicken eggs because they have a higher fat and protein content than chicken eggs. Our experiment was…
As we’ve started putting mead how-to videos on YouTube, each installment has certainly fallen into the vein of “doin’ the most.” But for the beginner mazer (mead maker), getting into the world of homebrewing should be a fun, creative, and fascinating endeavor. Complex recipes might be too daunting — discouraging even. For this purpose, we set out to build a beginner mead recipe compiled from ingredients that can be found…