Tag Archives: mead

Tasting of Doom

Beer, Mead, , , , ,

We were going to bottle a batch of beer, and were running short on 12 oz. bottles.  So we decided to taste all the homebrew we have hanging around (including some of questionable quality), and decide if there were any bottles we could free up — that is, if any of them were so bad we’d never drink them.

We started with our sours — five batches of saison fermented in 1 gallon glass growlers for a year, with various souring agents and a small honeycomb of oak for them to live on:

  • 17a (plain saison): this tasted fine, with more oak than we expected, but was almost completely flat.  Decision: borderline (would drink if we can carbonate it somehow).
  • 17b (Brett. bruxellensis): also fine, with good Brett character, but also terribly undercarbed.  Decision: borderline.
  • 17c (Lactobacillus): terrible and acrid.  Decision: drainpour.
  • 17d (Brett. & Lacto): sweet and cloying.  Decision: drainpour.
  • 17e (White Labs Sour Mix): very nice, but completely flat.  Decision: borderline.

We then moved on to our last batch of cysers/meads — again, small batches fermented in 1 gallon glass growlers, with four different kinds of honey:

  • 16a (Cross Creek Tupelo honey): sweet, rich, and completely flat.  Luckily still mead is a thing (not the thing we were trying to make, but sometimes you have to be flexible).  Decision: keep.
  • 16b (Cross Creek Everglades honey): very nice, but with a little bit of off flavor.  Decision: borderline.
  • 16c (Uncle John wildflower honey): lots of dark honey, oaky.  Decision: keep.
  • 16d (Uncle John’s clover honey): light, with tons of honey character, best of the tasting.  Decision: keep.

I’m left with an appreciation of how hard mead and sour beer are to get right.  Of the two, the mead definitely turned out better, with even the worst batch being tolerable.  By contrast, the sours with Lactobacillus are foul and undrinkable — it was easy to dump those to free up some extra bottles.  But the other sours were fine, other than being flat.  So we’re thinking about trying to force-carbonate them, either by decanting the remaining bottles into a keg, or using our Sodastream.

Another Year, Another Batch of Mead

Beer, Mead, , , ,

We’re back home after spending July up north.  And since we’ve got a few pounds of honey from Uncle John, why not make some mead?

Once it had enough time to mature, last year’s batch came out quite nicely.  Hardly even a faint hint of gym sock lingering.  So, this year we decided to change practically everything.  We did like the apple juice base, though, so it’s technically “cyser”.  And the results from last year gave us a pretty good idea of how much honey we wanted to use, but went with new juice (plain-jane Mott’s on sale) and yeast (Lalvin 71B).  We also varied the honey: one batch of Tupelo (which we’re calling Southern Cyser), one batch of molasses-like Everglades (Swamp Cyser), one batch with dark wildflower honey John gave us this year (Wild John Cyser), and one batch with a lighter honey John gave us last year (Old John Cyser).  We had a bigger jar of honey from last year, so we used more, pumping the gravity up to 25 Brix, so we hope it’ll finish dry and get to 12% ABV or so.

The Lalvin yeast is known for getting a quick start, and sure enough it was bubbling along first thing this morning less than 12 hours after pitching.  So with any luck, it won’t take too long to get there.

Bottling Barleywine and Cider

Beer, Cider, Mead, , , , , ,

We bottled our barleywine and cider this weekend.  Since it was Obama’s second inauguration day, we used a couple of kitschy tea towels we picked up at his first inauguration to dry out bottle caps and equipment after sanitizing.

The gravity of the barleywine had not changed since I moved it to secondary, so we probably could have just bottled it after two weeks.  Many of the comments about the yeast mentioned how fast it ferments, and I guess they were right.  Barleywine is traditionally aged for ridiculous amounts of time, so we’ve tucked the bottles in the back of a closet, keeping only a handful of small bottles in the pantry to test whether it’s ready.

We tasted samples of the four batches of cider/cyser.  The first batch (plain juice) was nice and dry, lots of good apple character without being juicy at all.  The second batch (juice plus concentrate) was fine when I had a sip of the sample I used to check the gravity, but was decidedly off when we tasted a sample from the end of bottling.  So we’re not sure if it’s just a problem with the dregs or if the whole batch might be off.  The third batch (juice plus honey) was a very interesting cider/mead combination, with a lot of the cider character of the first batch, but also the floral and reedy/bready notes of mead.  But the last batch (juice plus twice as much honey) was the most promising — it was a little sweeter, much more pronounced mead flavor, with the cider tartness really fading to the background.

Cider Four Ways

Cider, Mead, , , , ,

We’ve been drinking a lot of cider recently, and decided to make our own.  I had a hard time finding any decent cider recipes online (well, beyond “any old juice and any old yeast and it’ll be fine!” type recipes).  But got a good recommendation of a recipe that had worked for a co-worker of mine.  Though he switched the yeast and used Safeale US-05, so we went with that too.

Since this is our first cider, we decided to repeat our Saison experiement and make five different 1 gallon batches in growlers instead of a single large batch.  The plan was to make one gallon of plain juice, one gallon juice with apple juice concentrate, one gallon juice with candi sugar, one gallon juice with honey, and one gallon of water with honey.  But our small candi sugar batch was too shallow and wound up a caramelized, crystallized lump.  So we went with plain juice, juice with concentrate, juice with honey, and juice with even more honey.  We found unfiltered, no-preservative (not even Vitamin C) apple juice at our grocery store.  And we used a 1 lb. jar of Tupelo honey from Cross Creek Honey.

One thing that was surprising was the gravity of our apple juice.  I’d seen estimates online ranging from 1.035 up to 1.050.  But our juice was actually 1.059.  So we did some experimentation and found 12 oz. of apple juice concentrate added to a gallon of juice brought the gravity up to around 1.070.  We matched that with honey (about 5 Tbsp.) in one batch, and used the rest of our honey (about 10 Tbsp.) in the last batch.  We’re particularly interested in comparing the difference between honey and concentrate at the same gravity — how different will they be?

Another question was whether to heat or boil the honey.  In typical fashion, I saw opinions online ranging from “you have to boil honey or you’ll get botulism” to “probably good to heat to 170° to pasteurize” all the way to “don’t heat at all and don’t bother filtering out honeycomb and wings — they’ll settle out eventually”.  So we sterilized everything but didn’t heat our juice or honey at all.  Luckily there were no wings or honeycomb bits to filter out.

Autumn Mead

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We had the first bottle of mead just before Thanksgiving, and we’re pretty pleased with the results.  It has a very sweet, delicate honey flavor and is nicely dry.  There is still a little yeasty funk, but mostly from the sediment.  It was a nice accompaniment to Thanksgiving dinner.

So of course we’re already thinking about the next batch (which will probably have to wait for summer).  Some improvements we’ve got in mind:

  • Add a stronger-tasting honey (like Tupelo or Everglades) to the mix for a bolder flavor.
  • Using apple juice instead of water, again for a bolder flavor and a more cidery taste.
  • Switching to a yeast more suited to Champagne or cider.

We’re also thinking of brewing some cider, so we might do a few different batches with different combinations.

Mead in Bottles and Dubbel in the Carboy

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We bottled our first batch of mead this weekend, after being in secondary fermentation for about 5 weeks.  The advice I found online about how long to leave it fermenting was all over the place, but mostly ranged up to 6 months to a year.  But we’re impatient and didn’t want to wait 6 months to see if it came out or not.

It was nicely clear, and apart from smelling strongly of yeast, was very nice.  The final gravity was down to 1.006, for a final ABV of 8%.  We used the same honey we brewed with for priming sugar (thanks again, Uncle John!).  We’ll let the bottles carbonate a couple weeks, and probably have the first bottle at Thanksgiving.

As long as we had the all the gear out and sterilized, we also pulled the Dubbel into the carboy for second fermentation.  It looked and smelled fantastic, so we’ve got high hopes.

Surprisingly Like Mead

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We pulled the mead to second fermentation yesterday.  Since we only have one 1-gallon growler, we siphoned it to a 6-quart pot, washed the growler, and siphoned it back.  It all went pretty smoothly.

We actually remembered to check the gravity when we brewed and when we moved to second fermentation.  It started at 1.064, and was down to 1.010 (with a bunch of yeast messing up the sample) and 1.004 (with a clean sample).  By my math, that’s in the 7.5% – 8% ABV range.  Of course we sipped at the sample after checking the gravity, and it was surprisingly mead-like.  Definitely unfinished, just like beer coming out of the first week of fermentation.  But definitely promising.

Now we get to wait

Mead, ,

Everyone appears to have their own personal mead recipe, with different — sometimes diametrically opposed — and strongly-held views about things like which yeast to use, when to pitch it (and how many times), and how much white stuff to skim off the top of the honey-wort.

We whipped up a gallon of our own mead and put it in for primary fermentation:

We kept it simple: we boiled a gallon of water and then took it off the heat, added 2 pounds of honey, and then pitched 5g of Lalvin D47 yeast (a wine yeast) and a bit of mystery yeast food that our LBBS supplied once the temperature dropped to 85F or so. (We have a fancy-schmancy coiled copper wort chiller, but realized at the last moment that it can’t attach to our new, fancy-schmancy kitchen faucet. Oops. Luckily, with only a gallon to chill, an ice bath in the sink is a perfect (and honestly better) alternative.

Now – we wait for some tiny bubbles to burble up from the airlock. In a couple weeks, we’ll transfer over for secondary fermentation for a few months. With luck we’ll have some lovely mead in time for winter. (Or December, whichever comes first here in North Central Florida.)

 

Have honey, will brew

Beer,

During our summer trip to upstate New York, my uncle gave Redbeard and I enough honey from his bees to make mead with. We’ve been toying with the idea of making mead for a couple years now, but have never before been able to get enough honey in one place at one time. So, in anticipation of an extra day off this weekend, we swung by our Local Beer-Brewing Store (LBBS?) and picked up some 12-14% wine yeast.

(Small jar on the left is some blueberry preserves I made earlier in the summer – not quite up to tackling blueberry wine, though it is popular among local vineyards here.)

I’m hoping this will take our mind off of our mash tun woes…

Family Beer Tasting

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We went to visit family in upstate New York and brought some local beer to share.  We started with Swamp Head’s Saison du Swamp, which we’d been thinking of as a gentle introduction to saison.  But it was a much bigger shock than we’d expected.  We followed it up with a couple Cigar City beers: Sea Bass (which is very sour and funky, even compared to the average saison) and 110K +OT.

While we were there, we also had a few local beers: Saranac Summer Ale is a light, easy drinking Hefeweizen, and Southern Tier Crème Brûlée Stout is a crazy stout with an amazingly accurate crème brûlée flavor.  We also had some family homebrew: a wonderful strawberry mead, and a chocolate raspberry stout (which I liked a lot more than the Southern Tier).