Reddit mentions: The best red yeast rice herbal supplements

I understand that you lack a lot of space, so I'm just going to throw this out once. I make 5 gallon batches because it's the same amount of work as a 1 gallon batch, but you end up with a lot more mead. I can't imagine putting in all of the effort to make a batch and only getting one quart. That said....

Final sweetness and ABV are determined by both how much honey you add and what kind of yeast you use. Since the yeast is turning sugar from the honey into alcohol, if you only add enough honey to reach 5% ABV, it won't be possible to go over 5% since there isn't honey to ferment. Also each strain of yeast has a different alcohol tolerance, so if you add enough honey to reach 15% but use a yeast that has a tolerance of 10%, it will probably stop at 10% instead of reaching 15%. Since the yeast is consuming sugar, if you had two identical batches with enough sugar to reach 15%, and in one batch you used a yeast that could only reach 10% and in the other used a yeast that could reach 18%, the 10% yeast would be lower ABV and very sweet, the 18% yeast would be higher alcohol but much drier. So you need to both pick the correct yeast and have the correct amount of honey.

You can use bakers yeast (as in: it will convert sugar to alcohol) but in general this is a bad idea if you have access to brewers yeast. It's incredibly inconsistent. You might be able to reach 10% on one batch and 5% on the next. You could easily split a packet of champagne yeast across 20 quart sized mason jars. After all: a 5 gram packet is good enough for 5 gallons which is 20 times as much as a quart. Packets of yeast cost about a dollar, so you'd be compromising one of the most critical ingredients in mead to prevent spending $0.05 per batch. You can even re-use yeast if you are careful about it.

For the airlock, I know you said you are cheap but here are a few options of things to buy. You can throw something like this on top of a mason jar and it will work like an airlock. $10 for 6 isn't bad. Another option would be to drill holes in the tops of the lids, insert something like this and add a real airlock. Another option is to pick a vessel with a smaller neck and use a balloon with a hole poked in it. A final, much cheaper option, would be to punch a hole in the top and tape a piece of rubber over the hole tightly in a way that lets air out, but seals afterwards. I don't know how much I would trust that, though...

Without tools to measure alcohol content, at this scale, it is virtually impossible to figure out the alcohol content. You can make a rough guess, but that's all it will be. There's no way around this without buying a hydrometer, refractometer, or similar.

For the amount of honey to add, it very highly depends on what you want and what yeast you are using. Let's pretend you go with a champagne yeast. By volume,

• 1 part honey to 4 parts water will give you about 12% ABV and dry (so, 0.8 cups honey with 3.2 cups water)
  
  
• 1 part honey to 3 parts water will give you about 15% ABV and dry (so, 1 cup honey to 3 cups water)
  
  
• 1 part honey to 2 parts water should get you around 18% ABV and sweet (so, 1 and 1/3 cup honey to 2 and 2/3 cup water)
  
  The catch is, for reliable, repeatable results you absolutely should get some kind of yeast nutrient. Buy something like this and it will basically last you forever on a 1 quart scale. It's an essential ingredient for making good mead reliably. If you can't get your hands on that a substitute would be boiled bread yeast.

To add to what Mike said for sure check out /r/mead! There's a ton of good information in the side bar to get your started. The biggest thing besides good sanitation & quality honey/yeast is temperature control. Don't let it ferment in a hot garage or you'll end up with something akin to rocket fuel. To keep things simple at first you can just put it in a cool, dark closet and that will help your mead taste EXPONENTIALLY better if kept relatively cool (60-70 degrees)

Also another simple, yet effective thing is using nutrients. People get crazy nutrient addition schedules but just tossing the recommended amounts in at the start will make for a cleaner fermentation and a better tasting mead. Here's a link to some good stuff I like to use. Energizer And Nutrient


If you have a local homebrew shop they should have everything you need to get started.

Just my 2 cents! PM me if you have any questions and I'll be happy to help! :)

Mead is VERY forgiving, far more so than beer or wine. As has been suggested, JAOM is a great "toss it in and walk away" recipe, but almost any recipe will work for a beginner, even if it's done a bit off.

Things to remember:

Don't use bleach to sanitize, it's fucking hard to get completely out, and can render a batch unusable. I prefer IO Star to Star San as it doesn't foam up when you scrub the shit out of stuff with it, and it's easier to completely rinse.

Mead needs separate nutrient, it is quite cheap on Amazon you should also add Energizer perodically (once every other day for the first week and once a week for the next month) to prevent things from getting stuck along the way. A good guide on how/when to add fruit and how to perform step feeding, which produces the tastiest results, can be found HERE.

Wine Tannin can help to make your flavors "pop" and come out more brightly, add around 3 grams to a 5 gallon batch in primary.

Also, don't let things ferment in too warm a space, the place I ferment in is a steady 69 degrees, if you let it go too warm, you might end up with weird alcohols getting created, and your brew providing a headache along with a buzz.


Lastly, if you've decide you're going to get into brewing, don't go the carboy/bucket route. For a little bit more money (like $40 more than everything else combined), you can get a MUCH better/easier and compact solution. A conical eliminates the need to rack from one container into another (has a bottom drain to suck out yeast cake) it has a side drain to bottle from (I plug this into my filter pump and bottle right from there) is MUCH more compact then separate bucket/carboy & racking canes, and is a lot easier to clean because the hole in the top is like 6 inches across, plenty big enough for a hand and a scrubby sponge as opposed to the tiny 2" opening in a carboy (which are a bitch to clean).

Also, the supplier in this link (highgravitybrew.com) doesn't charge for shipping for these conicals, it seems like everyone else who sells them does even though they're all drop shipped from the factory regardless from whom you get it.

The best way I found to get started is to just get a gallon jug carboy, some starsan, some montrachet wine yeast, yeast nutrients, and 100% grape juice from your local grocery store.

The starsan is a concentrate, I put about a capful into a 2 liter bottle, fill it up with water, and keep it under my sink. It's an antiseptic rinse that should splash over everything that's going to touch the juice; airlock, bottle, your hands, the scissors you use, all that stuff. It doesn't even needed to be rinsed, just shake the bottle out and go to town.

Once you've rinsed, put the juice, yeast nutrients, and yeast in the bottle. Put some water in the airlock and put it on top. Put the bottle of juice and yeast in a dark cool spot until you can easily see a flashlight shine through it, about 2 months or so.

While it's doing it's thing collect 5 old wine bottles or get some from a brew supply store. Old liquor bottles work great, just rinse them good and then splash starsan around inside.

Buy a racking cane! This significantly simplifies the process of getting wine out of the jug without sucking up all the dead yeast at the bottom. Run starsan through it at first, filling the starsan cup with water as it gets siphoned out so that the inside is all nice and clean.

Rack that wine out of the jug and into bottles. That's it! Age for six months if you want, but I often just mix in a little fresh grape juice to sweeten it up a bit right there in my cup and go to town right away, hence my inability to age it.

The only regular cost is the juice. I like to get the frozen 100% juice on sale because I'm doing 15 gallon batches these days (because I'm going to outpace my thirst, darn it), I use about 14 of those per 5 gallon carboy and fill the rest up with spring water from the grocery store.

I also use 4 cups of 5 minute boiled raw sugar in each 5 gallon carboy of juice to boost the abv, but this is personal taste. It makes the wine taste pretty hot but it also has a solid kick to it so I don't mind. After I mix it with a bit of fresh grape juice it just tastes like a light sweet wine and I have a very good time with it.

There may be a regional preference at play here. New York has some pizza guys who are devoutly no sugar, but of the folks who are using it, 1% is pretty common. I've never heard of anyone using more than 2%, but it's possible that you might find someone, somewhere using 3%. When you convert the honey in your recipe to sugar, it translates into between 7.5% to 10% sugar. That's easily 4 times the NY average.

But, if everyone loves your pizza, then that's all that matters.

00 in a home oven is renowned for pale, super crusty/hard crusts. The one known workaround, which you've found, is a boatload of sugar. But, besides the potential for being too sweet for some (possibly regionally dependent), when you get into that much sugar, you're wreaking havoc on your yeast. It's a double whammy because, not only are you killing yeast activity, you're also creating a large amount of dead yeast, which impacts the crumb even more adversely.

If you really do prefer the honey note and the level of sweetness, then I might recommend investing in a high sugar yeast:

https://www.amazon.com/Instant-Yeast-Sugar-Tolerant-Vacuum/dp/B07D1XXHPR

Made for between 5% and 25% sugar doughs, this will play a lot friendlier with your dough.

At the end of the day, though, high sugar yeast is just one more workaround for the wrong flour for your particular oven. I know you've tested bread flour before, and have passed judgement on it, but you may not have given it a fair enough shake. I truly believe that if you gave bread flour as much tweaking and testing as you've given 00, you'd see how superior it is in the temps that you're baking at- that is, if you want a consistently puffy crust. If not, stick to what makes you and your family/guests happy.

I do think, though, that more water is a losing effort. On paper, it might look like if you add more water to the dough, you'll get more water in the finished pizza, but the excess water will extend your bake time even further and compromise your volume even more. It will also give you a dough that will be super difficult to handle. As it stands, the dough you're making has to be difficult to stretch.

I've not had Amy's, but a basic tofu scramble is very easy. Here's what I like to do:

• start with ~8 oz firm tofu, slice into 0.5-1 cm cubes, toss in heated, oiled pan
  
• after awhile use a basic spatula with grooves to scramble the tofu; i.e., squish the tofu between the grooves. It should now have the rough appearance of scrambled eggs.
  
• add spices. Start with curry powder, enough to very lightly dust all the tofu (mostly for color). Then salt and pepper to taste, with whatever else you think would fit, such as oregano. Then a very generous dusting of nutritional yeast powder -- this is the key, yielding color and nice cheesy taste, and also a solid staple for a vegetarian diet.
  
• mix thoroughly. The reason we didn't drain the tofu is because all that water will now absorb the spices. If it's still too dry or wet you can add water or spice to even it out.
  
• This can cook for as long as you want. All you really need to do with the tofu is heat it, which you've done. What I usually do is push the tofu to the side of the pan and add whatever veggies I have on hand. Cook mushrooms, onion, pepper, broccoli, spinach, etc., as you would normally in a pan (i.e., fry and/or steam by mixing with tofu and covering).
  
  A lot of recipes recommend soy sauce (or braggs), but I've always found that difficult to mix in thoroughly.

You can get it it with brewer’s yeast. Put a tablespoon or two in your smoothie or food a day. It’s super strong tasting but cheap and you get used to it.
Or you can get a sea vegetable based protein powder like this one which is more expensive but tastes good and helps up your protein.

I know it's been over a week since you asked, but this post inspired me to make lactation cookies (oatmeal cookies are my favorite anyway!) and they have brewer's yeast on Amazon. This appears to be the cheapest.

Also really excited that this page says the raw dough works even better. Mmm...

Not sure if these links will work for you but these are what I use

Yeast Nutrient: https://amzn.com/B0064H0MVK

Yeast Energizer: https://amzn.com/B0064H0LUW

They work great for me, and my mead always ferments dry in less than a week by staggering. In fact I just hit a new record on my current 5 gallon batch SG 1.100 to 1.000 in 4 days.

Might as well buy it off amazon. It will be cheaper.

This is the yeast I use I use. http://www.amazon.com/Distillers-Yeast-DADY-bulk-pack/dp/B0064O7T2I/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1406943897&sr=8-1&keywords=red+star+dady+yeast

Works very well IMO. No off flavoring unless I try pushing past 15% ABV or more. Been doing 18 gallon runs almost each week for about 9 months now and still have about 1/2 of the bag left lol.

This is also the yeast nutrient I use. 10 bucks for a pound. It will last forever. Used it in all my distilling runs, as well as about 30 gallons of apple cider and 24 gallons of wine and haven't put a dent into it.

http://www.amazon.com/Home-Brew-Ohio-Yeast-Nutrient/dp/B00JIVW97O/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1406944062&sr=8-4&keywords=yeast+nutrient

And if you have amazon prime you get cheap fast shipping, so even better.

http://www.amazon.com/Now-Foods-Nutritional-Powder-10-Ounce/dp/B00028M47C/ref=sr_1_1?s=hpc&ie=UTF8&qid=1381111521&sr=1-1&keywords=nutritional+yeast

I buy mine off amazon. This brand is very good. It's a powder so you don't need to worry about it being fresh.

I'm doing the Candida Cure and mostly following that method with the accompanying cookbook.

I'm taking a few supplements as well to kill the yeast. Yeast Fighters by TwinLab and Capryl Acid by Solaray.

I'm only about a week in and the sugar, bread, anything horrible for you cravings are rough, but getting better.

I'm sorry I don't really know it is just called Yeast Nutrient 1 lb on Amazon By Ohio Brew, and one tsp per gallon. Link to the product, you might know more about it -https://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/B00JIVW97O/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o00_s01?ie=UTF8&psc=1

EDIT;Compared to others it seems to be diammonium phosphate

Brewer's yeast is more a term used for the dietary supplement made from the dregs of beer that only contains dead yeast. Marmite is also made from it.

Like this https://www.amazon.com/Swanson-Brewers-Yeast-500-Tabs/dp/B002O8U99I?th=1