Cinnamon Mead

[rhino777]

How much cinnamon should I put in a 5 gallon batch of mead? I want to taste it but not have it punch you in the face. Looks like there's a nice recipe on gotmead.com but you have to pay to read their forums. :/

[yabodie]

You have to pay to read some sections of the forum, but not all. Search on cinnamon and a lot of pages pop up.

With cinnamon I would say 3-6 sticks to start with, depending on the source and the size. If that is too little, add more...

EDIT: The latest Zymurgy has a recipe for cinnamon mead. They call for, I think, 50ml cinnamon oil in a 5 gallon batch or to taste in secondary.

[PaKettle]

Another approach is to use cinnamon oil after the fermentation use like an eye dropper to you taste if you take care and measure out the drops you can get a repeatable result.

[jacbop]

Similar to the cinnamon oil or extract, you can soak several cinnamon sticks in 6-8 oz of everclear or vodka for a couple of weeks and extract a pretty powerful cinnamon essence yourself.

Dose it via a medicine dropper in an 8 oz sample of mead until you achieve the flavor you want. There about 0.05 mL per drop and 80 cups in a 5 gal batch, so if 20 drops gets you the flavor you want, so can scale up to 80mL (or about 1/3 cup) per 5 gal. That is just an example though...don't dump in 1/3 cup without going through the whole process and tasting it!

Hope that helps,
jacbop
Midland, MI