Pomegranate Port Mead

Welcome to the first installment of our series on brewing for pagan ceremonies. Our featured brewer this time is Sylvia, who showed me how to make a pomegranate mead for the autumn holidays.

Sylvia emphasized the importance of sterilizing everything. Sometimes she uses an oxygen cleaner, such as One Step. She didn’t have any on hand, so we sterilized with dish soap and bleach and rinsed everything well. “Sterilization is key if you’re not going to sulfite your mead. I don’t sulfite because too many people are allergic to sulfites,” she said.

We gathered all the supplies needed for the brew. Here’s the list.

20 lbs. honey
9 qt. commercial pure pomegranate juice
12 teabags Constant Comment tea (decaf) boiled in 4 cups water, brewed very strong
1 lemon, sliced thin
1 vanilla bean
Water to bring to 5 ½ gallons (will lose some in racking to carboy)
5 teaspoons acid blend
5 teaspoons yeast nutrient
1 packet Premier Cuvee Champagne yeast

I asked Sylvia whether she did something special to make the brewing process sacred. She said, “I’m always in circle when brewing, so there’s no need to magically purify and cleanse the space or cast a formal circle. I brew with sacred intent.”

For tannin, Sylvia likes to use tea. We brought a quart of water to a rolling boil and added 12 bags of tea. We let it boil for 10 minutes, then turned it off to continue steeping while we worked with the honey.

The honey we used was the last of a big bucketful of honey that she had purchased about three years earlier from Honeyville in Durango, Colorado. It had crystalized and hardened in the bucket, but Sylvia said that doesn’t affect the flavor of the honey. She filled a utility sink with hot water and set the bucket in it. That loosened the honey, and with some elbow grease I was able to scrape the melting honey loose.

We weighed the honey (in batches that would fit onto her scale) to assess how much there was, then decided to include a few jars of honey I had bought locally. That brought us up to a total of 20 pounds of honey for this 5-gallon batch.

We placed the honey into a large pot with about 2 gallons of water and let it melt, stirring from time to time.

Sylvia brought the honey water to a boil, then turned off the heat. She skimmed off the foam. Then, we poured the honey water into the primary fermenter, a large white plastic bucket. To this we added the steeped tea, the sliced lemon, the vanilla bean chopped into small pieces and 9 quarts of pomegranate juice.

Sylvia had a case of 12 quart bottles of pomegranate juice that she had picked up on sale. We used 9 quarts for making the must (that’s brewer for the fluid that will become mead) and reserved 3 quarts for topping up the brew later in the process. We then added enough cold water to bring the whole batch up to 5 ½ gallons. Because we had to get to an Ostara ritual that afternoon, we suspended some ice packs in the must to help it cool faster and sat around talking about brewing for a while.

Sylvia said, “This was a reasonable hobby when I started. Honey was inexpensive and home brewed mead ran about $1 a bottle to make. Now, with bee colonies failing, the price of honey has increased, so it’s more like $5 a bottle. It’s become an expensive hobby. But I still love doing it!”

Once the temperature of the mead fell to 80 degrees, we put in the acid blend and yeast nutrient. At this point, we took our hydrometer reading and checked for this brew’s potential alcohol, taking into account the fact that the fluid was at 80 degrees.

Then, finally it was time to add the yeast that makes it all come to life. Sylvia doesn’t hydrate her yeast in advance. We just sprinkled it in and gave a vigorous stir. Because this mead might be used at Fall Equinox or Samhain, I called on Hekate to bless the mead, singing the “Hail Hekate” song as I stirred the yeast into the batch. That song was written by Tara Kreauweaumonn and it’s one of the songs I’ll be teaching at my pagan music retreat in May.

After a week, Sylvia judged that primary (aerobic) fermentation had burbled along long enough. We racked the must into a 5-gallon glass carboy and popped in an airlock. It started bubbling, nice and strong.

Now this batch of pomegranate mead will brew (anaerobically) in its carboy for the summer and perhaps into the fall. In a future post, I’ll report on its progress through racking and bottling. I’ll let you know what the results of the taste-testing show. We’ll see whether all that juice results in a “port” character. And, of course, I’ll provide ideas for using pomegranate mead in ritual, with songs to enhance the magic.

Blessed bees!

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