Brewing

So far, my brews have been limited to mead, melomels and metheglins which I group under the Mead page. I hope to try my hand at beer and braggots eventually but I'm not there yet.

A Glossary

Age - to let a brew sit over time before drinking. 

Airlock - an airlock is a small device that brewers put in a cork that allows the gas produced in fermentation to escape from the bottle while preventing contact with outside air.

Back sweetening - adding honey to sweeten a brew either while fermentation is ongoing or after fermentation has finished

Ginger Bug - a fermentation aid for wild brewing. A ginger bug is to brewing what a starter is to sourdough. It is cultivated using the yeasts on a ginger rhizome and wild-caught yeasts and fed with sugar.

Lees - the sediment produced during the fermentation process

Melomel - mead brewed with fruit. Some melomels have specific names, such as an apple mead is called a cyser, a grape mead is called a pyment.

Metheglin - mead brewed with herbs and/or spices. Sometimes called Welsh Mead

Must - in meadmaking, the must refers to the unfermented mixture of water, honey and whatever else is added before fermentation begins. It is the mead equivalent to a wort in beer brewing.

Rack - to transfer a fermenting brew from one vessel to another. Often this process separates the clarified brew from the lees

Show Mead - a mead that is not flavored beyond the honey used in the fermentation. Tannins and acids are typically still used, but further flavorings in the second fermentation are not added. For clarity, I will refer to meads without additional flavorings beyond the honey used as show meads.

Wild fermentation - this is the process by which naturally occurring yeasts are captured from the air and deliberately cultivated into fermentation.