Compleat Meadmaker: Home Production of Honey Wine from Your First Batch to Award-Winning Fruit and Herb Variations Book

Ken has one hell of a sweet tooth. I picked this book up as I am giving a talk on meadmaking next month and wanted to read the modern foundational text for the practice to round out the weird technical knowledge I've picked up over the years.

I've produced fermented beverages as a hobby and professionally for seven and a half years now, and I am somewhat shocked that virtually every recipe in an introductory book about meadmaking has an original gravity above 1.08--meaning every mead, pyment, cyser, melomel, metheglyn and braggot in this book comes in somewhere north of 8%ABV, oftentimes north of 11%.

My problems with this are two-fold: First, any mead made at the strength indicated would need north of 6 months of aging, often much longer (this is alluded to several times in the text), which is total bullshit. Hobby fermentation, at the beginning, should be entirely about rapid prototyping--learn the basics, try something out, see if it's good, iterate on what you learned. Making products that are only palatable after half a damn year (at a minimum!) is not only discouraging, it makes learning good habits (note taking, sanitation, etc) more difficult. Second, high ABV honey wines are incredibly expensive to produce. There's no bummer quite like dumping several hundred dollars of poorly fermented product and while the experienced homebrewer/meadmaker/whatever might shrug and laugh it off, a first-timer is just as likely to ditch the hobby entirely.

His technique is good and he's got lots of excellent information on fruit and spices, but the overall book is kinda pubey and dives into evolutionary psychology here and there. Also the sweet tooth thing is real, homeboy really, really, really likes sizzurp.

It's the 21st century, read a bunch of forum posts from broke people about making fast-clearing, low-ABV meads (or melomels, etc) and if you like what you make consider snagging this one from the library.