"alien" > wrote in message
...
> I was perusing a catalogue in my local home brew shop recently and came
> across an immersion heater that you basically plug in and drop in a
> bucket. It was designed for beer use, but I was thinking of the
> possibilities of using it for wine and mead.

You can also get submersible ones at pet shops for aquarium use.

I usually only use enough
> hot water to dissolve the sugar and, depending on the wine, cover the
> fruit/vegetable matter for extraction. I would advise removing the
> heater before adding sugar. My next batch of mead will probably use a
> raw local honey so I could use it to heat water up enough to pasteurise
> it, should I wish to do so.

Make sure that honey is very sweet and aromatic in flavor. I used wild
honey on five gallons of mead and it has an aftertaste like kiddies cough
syrup.
Bob
--

Please excuse any errors in my post,
as I have dain bramage.
>
> Has anyone got any experience with these? Any other thoughts? It would
> be a lot easier than filling up a few large pans for hot water, and it
> was less than half the price of a 2 gallon kettle I was looking at
> recently.