Happy Mead Day (Tomorrow)| Practical Self Reliance
Mead Day is the first Saturday in August
Mead day is the first Saturday in August each year, and it’s the perfect time to try your hand at making this ancient drink!
Some of the oldest brews included honey, along with all manner of botanicals to make them both delicious and medicinal too. Herbal ales, wines and meads were some of the earliest ways of preserving medicine…and August is one of the best times to harvest wild herbs.
My beginner’s guide to making mead (honey wine) at home covers everything you need to get started. Need help picking a recipe? I’ve got you covered there too, with more than 50 Mead Recipes to fill your fermentation vessel.
If you’re new to winemaking and meadmaking, I’d suggest you also read the other posts in this series, including:
Beginners Guide to Making Fruit Wines, where I take you through all the steps in the winemaking process.
How to Make Herbal Wines and Mead, where I talk you through recipes that include botanicals for flavor and medicinal value.
How to Make Flower Wine (With any Edible Flower) really opens new doors for floral flavors.
Small Batch Winemaking can be done for micro-batches, making as little as 1 bottle of wine at a time, and the process and equipment are a bit different with super tiny batches.
How to Make Mead (Honey Wine) is mostly the same, but there are some particularities when working with honey.
Equipment for Winemaking, which covers all the durable equipment you’ll need to make your first batch (besides your ingredients).
Ingredients for Winemaking, which covers all the other things you’ll need (besides yeast).
Yeast for Winemaking can get complicated quickly, and there are dozens of common strains (and hundreds of obscure ones). Picking the right one is actually pretty important, but I’ve broken them all down for you.
How to Make Wine from Grapes, though not necessarily for beginners, but everyone always asks about this one first!
Winemaking Recipes can be hard to find, but I’ve put together a list of more than 50 to get you started.
Meadmaking Recipes are even more obscure, but I’ve got you covered there too.
Things You Might Need This Week
Poisonous Berries (A Forager’s Guide) ~ Sometimes successful foraging is about knowing what to avoid as much as what to pick.
Chokecherry Recipes ~ Chokecherries are aboslutely delicious if you know how to use them. These traditional recipes bring out the best in this wild foraged fruit.
100+ Medicinal Plants and Their Uses ~ New to herbal medicine? Scroll through this list of medicinal plants for some botanical inspiration.
Seasonal Preserving
Recipes to keep your larder full all year round…in season now:
Old Fashioned Blackberry Jam (No Pectin Added)
Canning Peppers (Hot or Sweet)
What are you harvesting, preserving, building, or exploring on your homestead this week? I’d love to hear about it!
Leave me a note in the comments…
(Comments only, please. Emails tend to get lost in my inbox, and as much as I’d love to get back to each and every one, my screen time is very limited…and things fall through the cracks, and emails get buried in my inbox. If you comment here, they’re all in one place, and it’s much easier to get back to every single one.)
Until Next Time,
Ashley at Practical Self Reliance
I have been making mead since I was 18 (I am 26 now). I use local raw honey and some wine yeast (although I have used just bread yeast at the store and it still turned out decent.) This year I have some lilac mead fermenting in my closet haha. Happy Mead Day!
Thank you ever so much love these kinds of cucumbers