What if I handmade Christmas gifts this year?

The oft-discussed “five love languages” concept includes gift giving as a language of love. In middle school I remember we had to rank our love languages from most preferred to least preferred, and if I remember right, gift giving came out last. To this day, I’m not the biggeset fan of giving or receiving gifts.

Maybe I am a scrooge, a meiser, or an ahedonic post-capitalist (depending who you ask), but I view myself as preferring practicality over everything. I’ve got drawers filled with gifts that have never found a use, and even more drawers filled with things I thought I’d use eventually, and the idea of taking anything out of those drawers and transferring them to a landfill where they wont decompose until long after I do doesn’t sit well with me. I’m not trying to lecture here; gift giving is a tradition that has permeated cultures for thousands of years. I just feel like many of the gifts I’ve given in the past have not been as useful as gold, frankincense, or myrrh.

The best gift I’ve ever received, bar none, is the water bottle that my sister gave me all the way back in 2019. It has received more use than maybe any object I’ve ever owned other than my smartphone. It’s saved the landfills probably hundereds of pounds of plastic waste by now. It’s become a part of my personality.

I wanted to make sure the gift was something that wouldn’t go to waste.

Why Mead?

Mead is a weird choice for a gift, but it came after I realized the following things:

• I have equipment to brew beer already
• More people will like a sweet honey drink than beer
• I can reuse the bottles
• You likely didn’t already receive mead for Christmas
• How hard can it be?

Quite hard, actually

Mead is one of the easiest forms of alcohol to create. So easy, in fact, that it can happen on accident.

This is because mead at its roots is simply honey, water, and yeast. Mead was likely discovered when honey was left in a barrel, the barrel got rained on, and yeast from the environment joined the party. Some time later, one of our great ancestors then drank from this barrel and then decided it was time for some Friday Night Football, even though he had no concept of Friday Night or Football.

If it’s possible to make mead in a barrel with entropy alone, then it shouldn’t be too hard to make it with all my fancy autosiphons and glass carboys and no-rinse cleansers and sorbates and metabisulfites.

This mead made me come to the realization that, at least when it comes to booze production, I am sub-caveman.

The Recipe

I decided that since I was starting this brew in November, peak apple season, I could make a cyser instead of a straight mead.

cyser (n.)

a mead that also contains apples

I found this recipe on YouTube from Man Made Mead on an apple-cinnamon cyser. The cinnamon scored this recipe bonus Christmas points.

Day 1 - November 7, 2023

• Sanitize everything with one tablespoon of One Step Cleaner per gallon of warm water
• Pour 2.5 gallons of apple juice into a 6-gallon carboy
• Pour 2.5 gallons of distilled water into a 6-gallon carboy
• Add 5 pounds of honey
• Actually, add about 3 more pounds of honey

I decided to add more honey to increase the ABV (alcohol by volume) to something closer to >10%. The original recipe aimed for about 6-7%, but at the last minute, I decided to make this a still mead instead of a sparking mead like the recipe states. This is because I needed to backsweeten the mead, but if I wanted to have the mead ferment in the bottle to become carbonated, I would have to backsweeten with a non-fermentable sweetner like erythritol.

backsweeten (v.)

to add sugar back into a fermented beverage after the yeast have eaten all the initial sugar during fermentation

If there was too much fermentable sugar in the bottle, and with a yeast with such high alcohol tolerance, I could very easily have too much fermentation happen in a sealed glass bottle. If that happens, I would have created a pantry filled with cinnamon-apple-flavored glass bombs. It felt too weird to add artificial sweetner to something that’s filled with honey, so I decided against it.

foreshadowing (n.)

a literary device used to suggest an event that will happen later in the story

• Mix all the ingredients together with a big plastic rod with expandable wings attached to a drill you told your dad you were borrowing to help your friend Tyler assemble a bedframe
• Siphon out a sample large enough to get a hydrometer reading, then write that down
• Mix the yeast in warm water for 20 seconds as described in the yeast packet’s instructions
• Pour the yeast in
• Wait, no, soak it for 20 minutes, not 20 seconds
• Worry a little bit, Google a little bit, read that it’s probably going to be fine, proceed
• Place the (sanitized) stopper and airlock on the carboy
• Set it in the back of your closet
• Wait

The hydrometer reading tells the specific gravity of the mead in its current, unfermented state (called “must”). Specific gravity means…I don’t know actually. I think it’s how thick the liquid is? (I’m not sure I could tell you what makes a liquid “thick”.) In our case, it tells us how much sugar is in the must right now so that once it’s done fermenting, we can calculate how much of the sugar has been fermented and turned into alcohol. That will tell us the ABV.

With an original gravity (OG) of 1.071, should the yeast eat all the sugar and turn it into alcohol, bringing the final gravity (FG) all the way back down to 1.000, we can use the following formula to calculate the ABV of the final product:

ABV = (OG - FG) * 131.25

In our case:

ABV = (1.071 - 1.000) * 131.25 = 9.32%

I was aiming for a higher ABV, but I used literally all the honey I had in my home.

Day 11 - November 18, 2023

The airlock on the carboy has all but stopped bubbling, bubbling only once every several minutes, so I decided it was time to start prepping the apples. This is where my lovely girlfriend Emily enters this story. We went to Sam’s Club to purchase 18lbs of apples and absolutely nothing else.

(The varieties, for those wondering, were Gala, Cosmic Crunch, Honeycrisp, and Fuji.)

After all the edible wax was boiled off of the apples, I sliced all the apples with the apple slicer Emily was so kind to bring from her home, and as I was slicing them, remembered I had purchased pectic enzyme to put on the apples to help extract more juice. I realized I had no idea when one should put the pectic enzyme on the apples, so I sent Emily down the rabbit hole for me.

Emily, who has never homebrewed in her life and I don’t even think has tried mead before, scoured meadmaking forums and /r/mead and gave me all the information she could find. She soon after started discovering a bunch of techniques and recipes I had never heard of. It really warmed my heart to see her take an interest in this. Ever since, she’s continued coming up with new flavors we can try to brew. I hope the two of us will get to make all of them.

Later that same night, we cooked potato soup for our friend Lauren. Lauren, who is a recipient of the mead I have secretly been fermenting under my summer wardrobe, could not know why I had so much apple paraphanelia in my kitchen.

I lied and told her I wanted to try making apple juice.

She said that sounds like the kind I’d be up to on a Saturday afternoon.

Day 12 - November 19, 2023

I siphoned all the mead into a plastic bucket fermenter and mixed in potassium metabisulfite (to prevent oxidation of the mead which can produce off flavors) and potassium sorbate (to stop the yeast from reproducing and eating the apple juice.) I then immediately dumped all the apples into the bucket, sealed it up, and went about my day.

(Actually, I only was able to add about 13lbs of apples because the bucket was overflowing.)

So far, things are going well.

Day 13 - November 20, 2023

Things are no longer going well.

The airlock, which should be completely inactive since I stabilized the mead yesterday, is going bananas. Somehow the mead began to ferment again.

After doing some searching, I found out that I had not properly stabilized the mead. It turns out you have to wait 24 hours after adding the stabilizing agents before they take effect. The yeast repopulated quickly and were eating all my precious apple juice.

This left me with one choice: kill it with fire.

My concern was no longer with neutering the yeast, they had to die. Now. The longer they lived, the less apple sugar would make it into the final product.

I read online that I needed to heat the mead to 150F for 20 minutes.

I got to get my first taste of the concoction tonight. And wow, it’s pretty good.

I was thinking that it would be far too dry to be enjoyable in this state, but the apples were so sweet that it was very delicious and apple forward. Since it had more time to steep on the apples, I knew that it would only get better with time.

Day 21 - November 28, 2023

Now that the apple extraction is done, it’s time to transfer the mead to its final container and toss in some cinnamon. It should only be in this container for a couple days, absorb some spicey notes, then finally get bottled. Here is what the apples looked like after it was done.

Day 23 - November 30, 2023

I have sanitized all the bottles and filled them. 35 bottles of delicious apple-cinnamon cyser are ready to go and be gifted to my wonderful friends and family.

This was quite the journey. With all the yeast mishaps, this mead became more difficult than any of the beers I had made in the past. It was an educational journey. I learned a lot about myself, and how much Emily can lovingly tolerate my nonsense. All that’s left is to finish this blog post, print out labels, and deliver it to everyone in December.

Day 26 - December 3, 2023

After a long, arduous month of brewing, I decided it was finally time for me to kick back and crack open a bottle of mead for myself. I earned this, after all. After all the time, money, and effort I put into this, it was time I give myself a gift.

A gift, I did not receive.

I cracked open my first bottle, and the cork flew off with a POW.

The mead was still fermenting…

How? I heat stabilized it! I followed the directions! I tried to castrate the yeast, then I tried to slaughter the yeast, but it was back, and with a vengence.

This means that all the precious apple juice has been turned from sweet, sugary goodness into more alcohol. How much more alcohol? I have no idea. I never took a specific gravity reading after adding the apples because why would I? The apples should have never affected the alcohol content. Because of this, I can only guess the actual ABV of the mead. It’s probably around 10.5-11% alcohol by volume.

How am I getting this number? Educated guess.

I’m not doing any more math. I did enough already. The mead is not only beyond carbonated, it’s completely dry.

A dry mead was the least of my problems, however. I got very lucky that my glass bottles were thick enough to withstand the pressure of the carbonation. If they weren’t, I would have had 35 tightly-packed glass bombs in the cupboard above my fridge. If any one of them shattered, it’s very likely that the kinetic energy could have set off another, and another, and another, leading to a sticky chain reaction that would have forever raised the eyebrows of future prospective landlords.

I was shaking as I took all the bottles down and “burped” each one to let out the pressure. I was worried one may shatter in my hands and shoot an eye out (the homebrewer’s A Christmas Story).

Luckily for me and my corneas, everything went well enough, though I did lose about three bottles worth of mead from the liquid that spewed out the bottles after opening.

Day 24 - December 4, 2023

Time to heat pasteurize again.

I let this go for 30 minutes at 150F this time, as opposed to 20 the last time. I checked the temperature with two thermometers to ensure my tools were working correctly. After sanitizing my bottling bucket and siphon, I put all the mead back in the bucket one last time.

To fix the dryness, I added about 2lbs of honey into the mead.

Day 26 - December 6, 2023

I sanitized all the bottles again, and filled them again. Now armed with 32.5 bottles, it’s finally Christmas time!

Epilogue

I know this article was full of moaning, but I really had a great time doing this. No regrets.

Making this mead was like raising a yeasty, sticky child for a month, but now it’s no longer my problem. Instead, it’s a fine memory for me.

There were a few people who got this mead early, before this blog post was written. Seeing their skepticism turn to enjoyment made this all worth it.

Making the mead distribution list may have been the hardest part of this whole process (yes, I know what I’m saying). Sometimes, it’s easy for me to lose sight of how much love is truly in my life. I can get distracted and lose sight of how many wonderful, amazing, interesting people I get to call my friends and family. I wish I could give all of you more mead than I am able to. When all was said and done, there were only a few bottles left over for Emily and I (especially after the in-bottle fermentation fiasco) because I had so many people to distribute this to.

In fact, I had to make cuts. If you are a couple or my immediate family, I wish I could have given you more than I have.

Thank you all for being such positive forces in my life. The last few years have been a time of considerable change for me and have flown by faster than I could have ever imagined. Just in the past year I have left a job; started a new one; taken in an amazing cat, Gibby; moved; met my lovely girlfriend; gave Gibby a new home; and experienced the passing of my unspeakably special dog, Rudy.

With how fast paced everything has been, I’m likely forgetting things.

For all of you who have stuck with me, been comrades through this exciting year as full of opportunity as vertigo: thank you, and I love you.

I hope you enjoy the mead.

Merry Christmas, and a happy New Year to you all.