Well, it's been a while, and if you're wondering if I've tried any yet, it's safe to say I don't have much left!
I let them sit for two weeks, get a little bit of age on, and then have been tasting them alternatively since.
This was... on the 16th, so literally 2 weeks after I bottled it, haha.
Helping Jono get his boat seaworthy.
I basically drank rum + mead in what I have dubbed an Apiarist (a boilermaker is beer and rum, see?) and cut foam to fit in holes.
I tried the Berry first as that did and still holds my fancy the most.
By this point in the ageing it had gone a bit brown instead of the vibrant purply red it was originally.
Still tasted great, though. Not as much blueberry as I was hoping for, as feared. But I solved that issue later.
This was the Vanilla by the looks of it, a week and a bit after that.
The Vanilla had carbonated a bit which opened up the vanillans a bit more, and made it feel like you were drinking a premix, haha.
The Choc Orange had sweet chocolate notes with a hint of orange. The Standard mead tasted, amazingly, like honey wine.
So, the verdict? On the right track, flavours are close to where I want them, just needs a bit of refining.
At this stage, I judged them to be about 8-10% ABV.
So on to the next batch!
So 3 weeks ago I received a package. Sort of.
10kg of honey, and also a little tub of creamed honey with apricot pulp mixed in. Tastes sublime!
Had to make sure I had myself organised and enough time to get the next batch going, so fast forward to the 29th of March and I am ready to go.
You've seen how it's done before so I won't bore you with pictures (unless you haven't seen it before, in which case, YOU'RE STARTING AT THE WRONG END!
This time things were slightly different, though.
There was this.
600g of dextrose split over 20L of mead. This is easy food for the yeast instead of having to expend energy chewing through the honey.
The theory being this will boost the brew to a higher ABV. I also redid my calculations and determined that I did in fact, screw up.
I had put twice as much honey in per litre as I had intended to, hence the super sweet mead. Still within range for a normal sweet mead, though!
So this time I used half the honey, so it should be about 1.25kg/5L.
And! I did a thing!
That is literally the lowest reading on the hydrometer, and I had to add more distilled water to dilute it enough to get it up that high, hahaha.
Now according to the table thing that comes with it, and providing I know how to read it correctly, 1.15 Specific Gravity gives me a potential 21.16%.
Anyway, enough of that for now. Here is them a couple of days later.
As you can see, I went with the Berry again. But this time I mashed up the mixed berries so that the blueberries would actually have a chance to work their magic.
I got some strange looks as I wielded the potato masher.
The Choc Orange is much the same, however I think I will throw another orange in a bit later on in the process to get a bit more orange to it.
The Vanilla now has Added Cinnamonâ„¢ as originally intended.
And then the new game changer. I was looking for something different to try this time instead of the standard mead, and came across an apple cinnamon recipe that sounded pretty good.
Then when I was shopping for ingredients I came across pears and a cunning plan was hatched. It smells amazing.
Anyway, that all happened a few weeks ago. Early last week I took a bottle of the Choc Orange around to a mates for a few drinks.
I noticed when I picked it up, it was rather firm feeling. Then I saw that the cap was slightly distended from it's usual position.
I promptly forgot about it as soon as I got there, and then opened the bottle.
To use a turn of phrase, it
grenade 'd all over the kitchen!
So turns out the yeast has got back to work in every bottle, and now they're all much carbonated and dangerously close to leaving if not a hot, than at least a sticky mess wherever they happen to be. D:
But! The Choc Orange! Oh, that delectable Choc Orange!
The carbonation has turned the sweet chocolate notes in to a rich almost dark cocoa flavour, and has let the orange come out a bit more as well.
It is soooo much better. Oh, and apparently a lot stronger than it was originally, too!
Pushing closer to 15% now, easy. Everyone that tries one now is surprised with how much kick they have, haha.
So I have been passing them around to friends, to ensure that it all gets drunk before they go pop.
Today marks 2 and a bit weeks* since I first started this batch, so it was time to pull the fruit out to ensure I didn't get any tannin flavours.
*very accurate form of time measurement, used by proffesionals
So I ran them all through a sieve and a big funnel (do you know how hard it is to find a big funnel??) and did a bit of this.
Now for the fun part. Yay maths!
So they originally measured out at 1.150 which is 21.16% potential.
The Vanilla Cinnamon came in at 1.048 which is 6.28% ish.
So if I'm reading that right and understanding how the calculations work, that means that this is already at almost 15%.
I'm guessing sediment and curse word from the fruits, etc will affect this to a degree, but the Vanilla Cinnamon doesn't have much to affect with.
Anyway, I measured the rest and if I'm doing my calculations wrong, at least I have the data to rectify it later.
The Choc Orange was 1.044, the Pear Cinnamon 1.026! (Also tastes amaaaazing!)
The Berry came in at 1.022.
Once this was done, I mixed up 200g of dextrose into distilled water to encourage the yeast a bit further and topped them up to the high tide mark.
Then I took another reading from each one to see where the SG was now. If I understand how this works correctly, I take my next reading from this new reading and then I should be able to backwards calculate how much extra I need to account for.
So, Vanilla Cinnamon 1.046
Choc Orange 1.038
Pear Cinnamon 1.022
Berry 1.018
This doesn't make much sense to me as I was expecting it to be denser. But I guess the SG of the syrup wasn't high enough to outweigh diluting the mead?
Maybe. I shall ask the brewshop guys about this and see what they think.
That kind of makes sense now that it's typed out.
Anyway!
We're getting in to winter now which means colder evenings and mornings.
I don't want to run the risk of putting the yeast to sleep again, so they're all tucked up in bed for a few weeks!
And that's where I'm at!
More as it happens.
Vanilla Cinnamon
Pitched:
29.04.2016
Racked: 16.05.2016
Choc Orange
Pitched: 29.04.2016
Racked: 16.05.2016
Pear Cinnamon
Pitched: 29.04.2016
Racked: 16.05.2016
Berry
Pitched: 29.04.2016
Racked: 16.05.2016
Cheers,
Matt