Raspberry Mead Recipe - My Fermented Foods (2024)

FAQs

How many raspberries for 1 gallon of mead? ›

You'll need 3 pounds of honey and roughly 6 ounces of raspberries per gallon.

Let your mead continue fermenting for the next 25 days. Be sure to keep the carboy between 65°-73°F. While your mead is ready to bottle after 30 days of fermentation, the longer you age it in the carboy the more the flavors will continue to develop.

The first thing you need to do is add raspberries. to your vessel. Freezing your berries before can help add more flavor. Just make sure they are thought when you add them. After that, you're gonna add your honey.

Unlike fermented veggies, you don't stick your berries into a super salty brine. I ferment my berries in a similar way to how I ferment my cranberries, I ferment them in honey. The honey makes them a little sweeter, but, more importantly, the honey naturally preserves the fruit.

Place a lid on the jar, screwing it down just lightly. Leave the jar out of direct sunlight, at room temperature for 24-48 hours. The berries will become more tart as the fermentation continues, but the faint taste of honey shines through. Store in the refrigerator, if you do not eat them right away.

Pour the fruit puree into the fermentation jar. Rack the mead from the carboy to the fermentation jar, taking care to leave as much lees as possible at the bottom of the carboy. Place the lid on the jar and refrigerate for 1 to 2 weeks.

Stirring twice a day is generally sufficient (if you have a fast fermentation, you might want to stir three or four times a day).

Traditional meads usually require six months to 2 years for the flavors to mellow and smooth and any off flavors to diminish. Melomels or fruit meads can take six months to 5 years for the flavors to fully integrate and the tannins and acids to mellow. Metheglin or spiced meads are quicker, six months to a year.

Even the tiniest bit of bacteria can completely ruin a batch of mead.

A mead that contains fruit (such as raspberry, blackberry or strawberry) is called a melomel, which was also used as a means of food preservation, keeping summer produce for the winter. A mead that is fermented with grape juice is called a pyment.

What does raspberry mead taste like? ›

Several buckets of mixed berry blossom honey and a whole lot of raspberries merged to become what a few people have called “adult juice” with 12.5% Alcohol. It was aged with a bit of oak to round out that raspberry tartness. It is sweet but not so sweet as to drown out the acidity.

Once your mead has finished its primary fermentation, the must needs to be racked off the lees.

If a piece of fruit was not poisonous as fruit, it will not be poisonous after fermentation. Fermentation does covert the sugar in fruit to alcohol (ethanol). That alcohol is intoxicating if you drink too much of it.

This fermented purée makes a great refreshing drink with a big splash of sparkling wine or soda water or both.

Due to the low sugar content in raspberries, only a small amount of fruity alcohol is produced during fermentation, so that raspberry moonshine is normally made from them. To do this, the raspberries are distilled together with a neutral-tasting alcohol.

A good starting point with most fruits is about 3 pounds of fruit per gallon of mead, though I have been known to use 5 or even 6 pounds of fruit. Fruit blends can produce some great-tasting meads.

We'll go over it in further detail later, but we recommend using between two and three pounds of honey per gallon of mead — 2 pounds if you want it on the dryer side, and 3 pounds if you'd like it to be sweeter.

A new planting in sandy loam soil requires 18 gallons per day per 100 feet of row. A mature planting in the same soil type requires 27 gallons per day per 100 feet of row. Increase the water rate for sandier soil, and decrease it for heavier soil.