One of my favorite simple meads, a basic spiced Cyser (apple mead) is a great choice for beginners. The use of apple juice allows you to save money on honey as a fermentable.
Originally Posted: Aug. 3, 2020
Table of Contents
Quick Specs
- OG = 1.105 – 1.115 (depending on apple juice)
- ABV: ~12 – 14% (for the 10lb version)
- Semi-dry (though this is up to you, really)
- Time: 6 months from start to bottling (might be able to speed this up)
- Yield: 5 gallons, or about 25 bottles
Intro
Cyser was the first mead I ever made; its simplicity and hands-off nature makes it perfect for beginners. Sourcing the ingredients is as simple as going to your local supermarket, though if you’re able to I would recommend seeking out fresh-pressed unfiltered apple juice. If the juice is unpasteurized or you pressed it yourself from local apples, you can even experiment with fermenting this crisp, delectable beverage using local wild yeasts.
Cyser is also one of the more affordable meads to make a large batch of. When I was a beginner meadmaker, I was on a tighter budget than I am now, and the cost of ingredients would often keep me from trying out a more advanced recipe. My fear was that I would spend a lot of time, energy, and money (especially on the honey) only for something to go wrong and I would have to dump the whole batch down the drain.
Affordable Fermentables
The main reason that cyser is a more affordable mead for beginners is because of the apple juice. Apple juice is cheap and plentiful, and a great source of fermentable sugars. In fact, just omitting the honey would still yield a delicious (and faster-fermenting) spiced cider.
Apple juice tends to have a Specific Gravity of 1.035 – 1.045, which if left to ferment out bone-dry would give you a 4.6 – 5.9% drink. Adding honey as an extra fermentable sugar to the mix will give you something with a bit more kick, something more wine-strength. When I’m doing quick calculations in my head, I average 1.040 SG from apple juice, plus 0.035 per pound of honey per gallon of fluid. Luckily for the budget-conscious, this means you don’t have to use as much honey to get something wine-strength as you would with a water-based mead recipe.
Brief History of Cyser
Intro
Although many claim mead to be the oldest alcoholic beverage in the world, there is often a lack of written historical evidence about different styles and types of mead—contrast this with the long written history of beers and wines. This is partly because mead was more often a hybrid beverage than other drinks were. Cyser, being a hybrid of cider and a “pure” honey-and-water mead, is a prime example of this trend.
Etymology and Traditions
The word Cyser is etymologically related to the word cider, both coming into French and then Middle English from the Medieval Latin “sīcera” (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cyser). While this style of mead was probably made at many different places and times, simple web searches tend to point to the Celts and the Norse (both of whom loved to drink any mead), the English (especially the early Saxons), and the French (especially the Normans) as being particularly fond of this drink.
Two regions with the longest attested modern cider cultures in the world are southern England and northern France, the former giving us the tradition of the wassail (a sort of seasonal “cheers”). The wassail itself had multiple meanings: the house-visit wassail in which a bowl of cider or cyser was brought door-to-door for everyone to drink from eventually gave way to the tradition of caroling, while the orchard-visit wassail was an event full of singing and chanting in the apple orchards, in order to promote a good harvest for the next year.
Displacement
Eventually, the easier to brew cider displaced the more alcoholic (and more expensive) cyser. In fact, it may have been the introduction of sweeter Norman apples during the invasion of 1066 that led the English to switch over to purely apple cider, rather than their previous practice of using honey as an adjunct fermentable sugar for a crab-apple cider. You can see a similar pattern with many regional fruit-based meads (such as grape Pyment in Greco-Roman culture), where the honey-fortified version of a drink is a transitional drink between a pure honey mead and a fruit-based wine or cider.
A regional mead style known as “Chouchen” is still produced in the French region of Brittany. While in modern times it is a straight mead made from buckwheat honey, in the past it has been described as a Cyser.
Ingredients
- 10 lbs. Honey of your choice (I’ve used Kirkland clover honey, and Kirkland wildflower honey, and Happy Belly wildflower honey)
- 5 gallons apple juice
- 2 – 3 Granny Smith apples, sliced thin (these add acidity). The thinner you slice these, the easier it is to get them out of a narrow-necked fermenter when it comes time to transfer your mead.
- 1 stick of cinnamon
- 5 – 6 whole cloves
- A handful of raisins (optional, if you want to be a little old-school. I doubt their efficacy as a nutrient nowadays, but I still throw them in for old times’ sake)
- Yeast nutrient
- Lalvin D-47 (my favorite yeast for fruit meads)
Equipment
- Fermenter of your choice
- Air lock and drilled stopper
- A large pot (used to ensure honey mixes well into first gallon of apple juice)
- Sous vide circulator (optional) or hot water heater (optional)
- Large funnel (you can get these at your local homebrew store)
- A mixing tool, such as a stainless steel spoon, an egg beater, or an immersion blender
Instructions
Warming Honey
Note: First off, I like to heat the honey container gently to make pouring easier. I’ve done this several ways: The simplest is to leave the container in a basin and fill it with hot water. Later, my favorite way to warm the honey became to put it in a basin with a sous vide circulator set to 94°F for at least an hour. I prefer the “no heat” method of mead making advocated by Jereme Zimmerman in his book “Make Mead Like a Viking”, because the mead won’t need to age as long to become drinkable. Keeping the honey under 95°F (35°C) also prevents the delicate aromatics from being destroyed by heat while still lowering the honey’s viscosity.
Step-by-Step
You can change some of these steps around if you wish to. This just happens to be the order that I do things for this recipe, based on past experimentation. And if you forget a step, in most cases you can just do it at the end (like adding the yeast or the nutrient for example).
- Warm the honey containers if needed per the above note. This will help you get as much honey out of the containers as possible. I place this step first because it can take a while.
- Sanitize all your equipment: Fermenter, airlock/bung, and pots and cooking implements that will touch your mead. I like to fill one whole side of my sink with Star-San and soak anything that will fit. This way I can also pour the sanitizer solution into fermenters or other containers using a measuring cup as needed.
- Place one gallon of your apple juice into a large sanitized pot (I use a stock pot because the high walls are nice). Heat it gently to help with mixing and to make a hospitable home for your yeast (don’t exceed 105°F).
- Once honey is warmed up, pour all of it into the gallon of apple juice. Mix well to make sure that all of the honey becomes liquid (I’ve found that a combination of immersion blender and spoon work very well, especially if the honey is stubborn).
- Add yeast to the warm mixture, allow it to hydrate, then stir it in.
- Place sliced apples, cinnamon, cloves, raisins, and yeast nutrient into the sanitized fermenter, then pour the juice-honey mixture over that. A large HDPE funnel helps a lot, especially if your fermenter has a narrow neck. Shake the fermenter around a little to mix.
- Add the rest of the apple juice and aerate the must per your favorite method. I’ll usually pour part of each bottle of apple juice in, then put the cap back on and shake to oxygenate the remaining juice in the bottle. An aeration pump and aeration stone are also good to use.
- Take a gravity reading and write it down in your notes. You’ll need this number if you want to accurately gauge the alcohol content of your brew at the end.
- If you’ve used an unfiltered fresh apple juice and want your mead to be clear, now is the time to add pectic enzyme. Pectic enzyme is denatured by alcohol, so adding it at the end won’t do anything.
- In a few months, your Cyser should be ready to bottle.
Variations
- Lalvin D-47 is a personal favorite yeast for fruit meads (they say it helps the fruit flavor really shine through), but I’ve been wanting to try this recipe with a D-47/Hornindal Kveik blend to see if I can speed up fermentation at 95°F.
- Likewise, I want to try a wild yeast version of this recipe. The wild yeast found on local apples here (Seattle area) make a nice dry cider clocking in at 1.000 SG or lower. I’m not sure what the alcohol tolerance is for this yeast blend, but if it doesn’t dry out enough to my liking, I can just throw some Lalvin EC-1118 (I like this yeast strain for finishing things off).
- Bochet: a caramelized honey mead. A delicious Cyser/Bochet hybrid can be made by subbing out regular honey for caramelized honey. Easiest way I’ve found to caramelize honey is in a slow cooker. It’s best to only caramelize 5 lbs. at a time, even with a large 10-quart slow cooker, as honey expands A LOT when heated and you might end up dealing with a very messy boil-over. I’ve done this at both the low and high settings of my slow cooker. Both methods work, but I prefer a low slow cook for longer time because you don’t have to watch it as religiously.
- You can try brewing a lower ABV (almost sessionable) mead by using less honey, or a more fortified mead using more honey. Keep in mind that the fermentation time and the osmotic stress on yeast cells is directly proportional to the fermentables that you add.
Tips & Tricks
- Acidity is important when fermenting fruit-based wines and ciders. If you’re pressing your own apples or manage to find unfiltered juice for sale, a tart apple or a blend of apples (tart, sweet, and bitter) is best for the end flavor. A traditional “cider apple” or crabapples both make excellent choices if you can find them.
- Alternatively, if you can’t find tart apple juice and the Granny Smith slices don’t lend enough acidity, homebrew supply stores sell a powdered “acid blend” that you can add at the end of fermentation. I’ve never seen anyone write out a specific amount to add (i.e. “one tablespoon”), all the instructions I’ve ever read said to add it “to taste”. This is part of the nature of brewing; there are so many variations on a brew, and many things can happen throughout the brewing process that can affect the final flavor. Try adding a teaspoon at a time, stirring, and tasting to see what level of tartness suits your palate.
- Note on previous tip: I’ve never actually had to add acid blend to a cyser, but it’s a good general tip for mead making.
Possible Culinary Uses
I think Cyser would be a good alternative to cider in a Cider-Braised Pork Tenderloin recipe.
