I am new to these boards, this is my first post.
I've been a mazer (mead maker) for a couple of years now, and I love the stuff. It is so versatile and every batch is so very different. I have a 5 gal batch of bone dry chocolate strawberry mead clarifying in my kitchen now, a gallon of garlic mead itching to be bottled, two bottles of my award winning oak aged chai mead still around (saving for a mead competition) two bottles of my cyser (apple mead), about 6 bottles of rum fortified banana mead, three bottles each of two different batches of plain buckwheat mead, and about three gallons of sack mead (very sweet high alcohol content mead) I am planning to cold distill.
If you've never tried mead go out and try to find a bottle of Moniak mead, its about the best sweet mead you can get on the market, otherwise most states have a local meadery, and if you are Canadian there are a few Canadian meaderies too. That being said commercial mead is rarely better than homebrew.
If you are looking to try to make mead I run an online mead community called The Mead Hall (mead.lilleypress.com) that has tons of recipes and tips on mead making. Hope you don't take this as spam.
As for the person who was wondering about pasteurized vs raw honey, I always use raw, any processing is bound to take out some of the complexity of the honey and the more complex the honey the more interesting a mead it will produce. As for the risk of bacterial infection on honey, honey is naturally resistant to bacterial infection the water content is too low for bacteria to survive, that's why honey that is even thousands of years old is still edible. The only advantage pasteurized honey has over raw is that pasteurized honey won't crystallize as quickly, but even this isn't really a benefit as even rock hard honey can be re-liquefied by simply submerging the container in a hot water bath. Really mead can be made with almost any honey, even the store bought highly processed national brands.
Yeast types vary and will depend on what end result you want. Want a dry or high alcohol content, use champagne yeast such as Lalvin 1118, it has high alcohol tolerance and ferments super fast. Want something a little sweeter with the alcohol content closer to a white wine, use Lalvin D47 yeast, it will ferment slower but won't have the off flavours champagne yeast can sometimes produce, it has a lower alcohol tolerance so will leave your final product sweeter. If you want a beer like mead (aka braggot) use ale yeast and put some hops in the must. Even standard bread yeast can be used with wonderful results.
Aging your mead varies alot as well, a sweeter mead can be drunk younger, sometimes immediately upon bottling. Dryer meads benifit more from aging. Meads generally age slower than wines as they are not as quick to oxidize, which is part of the aging process. Meads stand up better over time, and some meads will be fine aged 10 years or more. Generally speaking 6 months to a year is ideal, but its best to open a bottle every now and then and taste how the process is coming along. One method of doing this is to open a bottle at 3mo 6mo 9mo 1yr 2yr 3yr 4yr and 5yr tasting at all the different aging stages, try to take detailed notes so you know how long a specific recipe takes to age to perfection. Of course this process isn't really necessary, and to be honest I've never had a batch last much more than a year in my closet, I can't resist a good glass o' mead.
I don't care for commercial chai tea and make my own from whole spices. So I have to ask a few questions....
I like to be as self-sufficient as possible, but I realize there is not much ss with chai in New England as most of the spices are tropical!
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