Things To Do With Honey

Things To Do With Honey. Part II. The Tale of Two Meads. By Pete Ricks OK, so technically it was 1 Mead and 1 Melomel, but who's really keeping track here? This is Part II of a multi-part series about what to brew with honey. Of course, one of the main things to brew wth honey is the ancient beverage of Mead. Mead has been brewed for centuries and thankfully the tradition has been carried on into modern times. There are so many different variations of what you can brew with honey. Fruits, spices, and many other additives have been combined with honey over the years to create some truly unique beverages. I haven't brewed Mead for that long but I feel like I've learned a thing or two about the yeasts that I have been using, what I like in a mead, and also what I don't like. Most of the meads that I have brewed so far have been fermented using Champagne Yeast, but I can't say that I've been that satisified with the results. Champagne Yeast has a distinctive taste, kind of a dry bite, that I don't really care for so I wanted to try something else. Someone told me that they had used the White Labs Merlot Red yeast on a Cherry Mead with good results. So I thought that I would split a vial between a cherry mead and a regular mead and see what happened. Yep, starter time! For this starter, I drizzled about 150 ml of honey into my starter flask and boiled it for 10-15 minutes. My starter size ended up being 800 ml total after the vial of yeast was added and it started to ferment within hours of pitching, but not as vigorous as a malt starter. The next day, I prepared to brew the meads. For the cherry mead, I wanted to use a new source of cherries and I'm glad I did as the result was far superior than what I had been using. I had been using 32 fl oz containers of 100% cherry juice from Trader Joes, but the puree from Oregon Fruit products is more "pulpy" and as a result, the cherry flavor seemed to be much richer. I carefully weighed out 12-13 pounds of honey using a bathroom scale( no one said homebrewing had to be scientific!) and this is when I discovered that my 5 gallon bucket of honey wasn't exactly 5 gallons! Yep, by my calculations, I was missing about 6 lbs, or 1/2 of a gallon of honey. A gallon of honey weighs approximately 12-13 lbs and the bucket weighs 2.5 lbs so worst case I should have had about 62.5 lbs of product here but my bucket only weighed 57 lbs. Hmmmm.... Anyway, I weighed out the 13 lbs of honey and pastuerized both the honey and the cherry puree for about 15-20 minutes at 195 degrees. I then chilled the must to 75 degrees in a tub sink and added the mixture to 3 gallons of filtered water in a 6.5 gallon carboy. I swirled the yeast starter and added approximately 400 ml of yeast slurry to the honey/cherry must. Now it was time to do the regular mead. For the regular mead, I wanted a medium, well balanced result so I started with 1 gallon of the Arizona Desert Honey in my brewpot and added about another 1 - 1.5 gallons of water. I pastuerized this for about 15-20 minutes, cooled to 75 degrees, and then pitched the other 400 ml of Merlot Red yeast slurry. I placed both the of the musts side by side to ferment and they both seemed to take off rather quickly, although the cherry was much more vigorous. This is when I started to notice a difference between the fermentations. Although both the meads initially built up a nice canopy which then collapsed, the cherry mead kept on going while the regular mead seemed to go into hibernation. The picture on the left is what the cherry mead looked like and although it is kind of hard to tell in a still photo, the cherry pulp was flying around inside the carboy somwhere between 0 - 100 mph. It was a very active, and quick, fermentation. After a week, I measured both and the cherry mead was done, having dropped down to a target gravirty of 1.020. So I threw it into a the cooler to stop the fermentation activity and then measured the regular mead. Much to my surprise, the regular mead had only dropped about 15 points, to 1.070. How could I have pitched the same amount of yeast on both batches and gotten such different results? Maybe because I forgot to add some yeast nutrient to the regular mead? This would do it! Regular meads need yeast nutrient because honey doesn't have the minerals the yeast need. Nevertheless, I threw this mead off in the corner and let it ferment down to 1.020. This took about 5 weeks as compared to the cherry mead which was done in 1 week. I then chilled it and racked it into a keg for aging. So what did I learn from this little meading experience? I learned that you probably should add some yeast nutrient to a regular mead but that the fruit meads don't seem to need it since the fruit provides the food that the yeast seem to need. I also learned that the White Labs Merlot Red yeast gave me the results I was looking for. Both meads have a smooth, silky mouthfeel and are well balanced. No more dry bite. The cherry flavor is much improved, being much richer like what you would taste if eating some cherry pie. The regular mead is nicely balanced and very drinkable. One thing that I did notice is that after kegging and letting the meads warm up to room temperature, the Merlot yeast really kicked back up into high gear as both meads started fermenting again. Guess I will have to kill the little buggers off with some yeast killer next time, not that I like adding anything more to my meads than I have to. Both meads are very drinkable, especially for only being 3 months old. I plan on entering them into the next beer competition to see if others agree with my high opinion of the Merlot Red Yeast. Until next time, Wassail!