Mead, or fermented honey wine, is a delicious ancient fermented beverage and it's so easy to make! This elderberry mead, made with foraged berries, is a wonderful version of classic mead and perfect for the holidays.
Sanitize all of your tools and supplies you will be using to make this mead.
Put the elderberries into the crock and mashed them up a bit with a potato masher to get the juices flowing.
Add about a gallon and a half of cool water, along with a cinnamon stick and a few whole cloves to the berries in the crock.
Pour in five pounds of raw honey.Since the water is cool the honey won’t totally dissolve right away, but that’s ok.
Sprinkle the yeast on top of elderberry mixture. (Stirring isn't necessary.)
Cover the crock with a towel and put in quiet corner of your house. By the next day you should see some bubbling action.
Stir the berries down once a day.
After about a week, when the bubbles start to slow down just a bit, but are still going strong, rack the mead off of the berries into gallon glass jugs with airlocks. Use an auto siphon to transfer the liquid into gallon jugs.
Equal out the levels of mead, then add more honey water to top it off. This will help to reinvigorate the yeast and give them a little more to chew on. Then fill the airlocks with a little water to the line, and put them into the jugs. They should start bubbling away again pretty quickly. Let this go for several weeks until all signs of bubbling has stopped.
Once the bubbling has completely stopped, you can bottle the elderberry mead and age it for several months.
Notes
Tip: elderberries come off the stem easier if the berry clusters are frozen first.
You can use dried elderberries if fresh aren't available, just rehydrate them in some water first.
If you don’t want to do the primary ferment in a crock, you can make this in airlocked gallon jugs, using the same method I used in my How to Make a Gallon of Mead post, just use elderberries as the fruit.
Using 5 pounds of honey will result in a fairly dry mead for a two gallon batch. Use more if you like it sweeter.
Be aware that cuvee yeast produces an extremely dry end product, so if you’re looking for some sweetness you’ll either need to add more honey or use a sweet wine yeast.
Due to evaporation, I ended up with slightly less than two gallons of elderberry mead, which actually works out well for this recipe.