Beeman's Beehut

Steve and Jan Haystead started a business making honey mead in Montague MI.  This for most seems to be a different way of making a good alcoholic drink that most are not familiar with.  Click below for entire article.

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Just to let everyone know who reads this.  I just got an email back from Steve Haystead about selling Honey Mead.  He said to be compliant with the state and federal government in Michigan took them thousands of dollars and 4 years before they could actually begin making and selling honey mead.

If this is a direction you want to go, then I would suggest to have the time and money and place to do it.  Otherwise its probably a waste.  You could also just wait for the economy/country to collapse then you don’t have to worry about any regulations anymore.

I’ve started making some Honey Mead (other wise called honey wine) I figured I’d do this to see if I could make some.  I started doing some research on it and found out that its really easy.  All you need is Carboy(big glass bottle thing) a rubber stopper to fit the top and a Air Gap and some yeast.  I bought all these items from the liquor barn for under $50.  In the YouTube video I watched all I needed to do was take about 3 gallons of distilled water put it in the Carboy (you don’t want any chlorine in the water, it could kill the yeast).  Add about a gallon of honey.  Shake the honey/water mixture to get it oxygenated and just to mix everything up a bit.  I added some berries at this point to try and give a berry taste to it.  I then added the yeast, put the stopper and air-stop into the lid of it and put the entire thing in my closet.  What the air-stop does is when the yeast consumes the sugar(honey) it then releases carbon dioxide.  The carbon dioxide being made is more than what the bottle can hold so the air stop allows for the gas to escape while keeping the air out.  We want to prevent any oxygen getting into the bottle and ruining the process and the taste.

Well right now my bottle of Honey mead is about 3 weeks told and it looks like the yeast making carbon dioxide seems to be slowing.

For those of you wanting to make mead for selling, its a lengthy process with the Government and tax restrictions both with the state and federal government.  It takes wine makers an average of 2yrs to get their permits and everything complete.  I believe you can give wine as a gift but you can’t sell it unless you have the proper permits and everything.  We’re almost like a socialist country with all the regulations on every little thing a person wants to do.  Please leave comments if you have any information on the process of getting permits for mead selling.