Making Your Own Mead: 43 Recipes for Homemade Honey Wines (Fox Chapel Publishing) Basic Guide to Techniques, plus Recipes for Mead, Fruit Melomels, Grape Pyments, Spiced Metheglins, & Apple Cysers

I have brewed mead for a long time, and Im always in the look out for new ideas. I have made many variants of mead, from Cheesecake strawberry melomel, to white chocolate mead. So im always on the look out for new ideas. Anyway i did a search for mead and this was one of the books that appeared. Since it was under ten, i gave it a shot. The book is a small book, but the quality of the print is excellent. While it appears to be a small book, it is straight foward and is loaded with recipes. I really like that they decided to to make the recipes for a one gallon run. This makes it easy to adjust amount if you want to say make a five gallon batch or a six gallon batch etc. Other books are not stadarized, i have seen books where the recipe is for one gallon, the next one for 2.5, the next for five etc. Some books i have seen dont even tell you the yield. . It just complicates matters by not being consistent with the final yeild. The recipes in this book are for one gallon batches and its easy to figure out what adjustments you need make if you want to make a larger batch. This nice thing is that since it is for gallon batches it is easy to set up an experimental batch of a specific mead to see whether you will like it or not. For example there is a recipe for gooseberry mead. I did not want to do a five gallon batch and find out imwas not gonna like it, so i followed the one gallon recipe of this book and im glad, bc gooseberry mead is not to my liking. But the Ale mead was, so i later made a five gallon batch of it. The book ismto the point and simple, it tell you what you need to get started and has lots of recipes, it doesnt go off on tangents, or get scientifically technical. Small book but loaded.

Great for beginners

I'm completely new to making mead. With that being said, I actually put my first batches together before getting this book. I really wished I had gotten it sooner because its pretty helpful. There are some oddities about it though. Pros: 1. The photography is well done 2. The History is interesting 3 Loads of different recipes Cons: 1. There are quotes from the book...in the book. This just seems to take of valuable space that could be used elsewhere. 2. Some information is vague. I understand that the book was short as intended to be, but I would have loved more description in regards to some ingredients/chemicals and processes. All said and done, it is a good book. Anyone who is looking into mead making could do worse than not picking this up. it's quite helpful.

So many great recipes

This is a fantastic book, and one I would heartily recommend to anyone else who, like me, have no mead making experience. It has a brief history of mead, and some nice facts about it, then goes into the process simply and completely on how to make good mead. Towards the end of the book it gives you a good triple handful of wonderful sounding recipes that I cant wait to try and make. The book was able to take me... a regular guy who has 0 wine making experience and ive just finished putting my first batch to ferment in my carboy. An Orange Melomel…. it smelled WONDERFUL, I can not wait to taste it in a few months.

The book purports to contain 43 different mead recipes. That's a blatant lie. The book contains 43 recipes that feature alcohol and honey, but 16 of them are for honey-sweetened wines and the like. The book only contains 27 mead recipes, and even that count is a little misleading, as several of those recipes are slight variations on the preceding recipe. The number of unique mead recipes in the book is only 20, less than half of what the cover promises. The recipes themselves aren't even that creative. It's just the base recipe with a fruit or spice added, in most instances. The information contained is good, but the authors don't bother explaining everything they reference. For instance, Campden tablets are referenced throughout the book, but the term is never defined. (They're sodium metabisulfite tablets, for sterilization) The authors never engage with any other sterilizing methods, or even discuss if sterilization is necessary at all! (For the record, Campden tablets are completely unnecessary if you're working in a smaller batch (<1 gallon) and you use high quality ingredients and sterilize your equipment. Overall, it's not bad, just uninspiring and misleading.

The first half of the book is on the history of making mead, and the second half is all the recipes. Great little book. Great variety of recipes.

I have been brewing beer (off and on) since 1993 and recently started making mead. It's hard to say whether this book is suitable for a beginner but I believe it would be. I found most of the steps to making mead are very similar to brewing beer (racking, sanitizing, fermenting), so I skimmed through parts of it. I particularly enjoyed the color photos. The beautiful bottles of crystal clear mead inspired me to make something similar. There are a good number of different recipes at the end of the book. There are recipes for sweet, semi-sweet and dry meads, along with recipes that include fruit, fruit juices, spices, different honey varieties, etc. The book is written in a style that's easy to read. The author didn't leave anything out but I would have enjoyed it more if it had been longer.

Looking forward to try some of these recepies out...if I can find the ingr. Here in Iceland

Exactly what I wanted

First of all, I was surprised to notice the very small size of the book when I received it. There is only a total of 60 pages, which seems awfully low when talking about making mead. There is section covering the historical setting and sources, which takes about 1/3 of the book. Interesting, but if you already know a little about mead, you most likely will not learn much. The mead making technique covers a mere 10 pages. It's very very basic, but there are several illustrations that help in having an idea about the setup one could like to deal with their beverage. There are 7 recipes for regular mead. They also devote a small section to melomels (fruit meads), totalling 14 recipes. Most of them are very basic, like "take the regular mead, add *choose your fruit*, and let ferment. While good, it lacks a lot of originality. Kudos for briefly talking about Pyment, Cyser and Metheglin and Hyppocras , and others drinks including honey, but then again, I'm kind of not really impressed about this book. It's a very basic guide to mead. I would not use this book alone, as it lacks a lot of the information, in my opinion, about safety, being sanitary,potentials problems, etc. It's not bad, the info still seem accurate, but I was really expecting more out of this one. If you really don't have more money to buy another one, you can make something out of it, but I would suggest moving on to a more complete book.

Good book ,look forward to trying themail recites, thank you

A few recipes, very little background on actually making Mead. You're better to spend some time surfing the internet than buying this.