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My Birthday Brew
I just wanted to share with everyone a recipe for mead that I made to drink on my birthday in July. Some background: My friends and I make mead all the time, but rarely let it age to its best flavor because we are really impatient to share our homebrew with our friends. So in May I began brewing some mead for my birthday in July. It was my first large batch, since before I had only been brewing 1 gallon at a time. In honor of my birthday I bought a 5-gallon carboy and made some herbal mead. We drank it for my birthday, but we still had plenty left. Last weekend I popped open another bottle, and it was so good! Now I am definitely going to practice having some patience and letting my bottles sit longer.
SO the mead was made out of 3 pounds of honey, and one bottle of maple syrup (because I ran out of honey). I made a tea using rosemary, wormwood, mugwort (both of these last two are quite bitter just so you know), nutmeg, cloves, yarrow and saffron. THese herbs are all rather aphrodisiac and many are psychotropic in nature, which is what I was going for. I let them steep in boiled water, covered, for several hours before mixing them with the honey in the fermenter. I also put a bit of the herbs in the fermenter, the artemisias (mugwort and wormwood) specifically extract better in alcohol. I racked it in June, putting honey in each of the bottles for a little carbonation. The buzz that I got from this mead was really nice, by the way.
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