There is a honey research group at USyd and who regularly have vast quantities of honey going spare. We thought that mead was a good idea…

Ingredients

• 5 kg honey (a mixture of leptospermum, banksia and eucalyptus)
• Zest and juice of 1 lemon and 1 lime
• 1 tsp each of: coriander seed and cloves
• 1 piece of liquorice bark approx. 4 cm in length
• 3 pieces of cassia bark approx. 4 cm each in length
• 1 black cardamom pod, split
• 1 nutmeg freshly ground
• 25 g Fuggles finishing hops
• Made it up to 23 litres

We used Lanvin EC118 champagne yeast and kept the fermentor at a reasonably constant 22 °C.

Day 1: SG >1050 but we didn’t have a hygrometer capable of measuring any further at the time.

Day 49: SG 1020

Day 67: SG 0995

Day 84: Racked it off into a clean barrel and added 1 tsp finings

Day 102: SG 0993 bottled into 30 x 750 ml PET bottles – no priming involved this time.

Notes

Two months after bottling it was clear and slightly fizzy. Very dry.

The honey has given it a very strong flavour (yum) and I prefer to dilute it a bit with lemonade.