Lovemongre

Recipes 

I have what I guess might be considered a pear/apple melomel chimera. Last fall I had a lot of left over pears and I decided to throw something together. I've brewed a few batches of beer and one batch of mead, but am relatively inexperienced at the brewing process. I really didn't write anything down, but as I remember I simmered and milled the pears to come to about 3 gallons of thick must. I added water and then honey to bring the OG up to about 1.09. I added about a gallon of apple juice to top it off. Pitched some champagne yeast, pectic enzyme and campden tabs and open fermented it in the primary and then an airlocked secondary. It has been racked three times and has been sitting in the still secondary for several months. It's sitting at around 1.0o5 SG

So... I haven't done anything with it because it tastes, well, like alcoholic water. At the second racking I added some Cinnamon and clove, and now that is all you can taste. I read that pear imparted very little flavor and that is certainly the case here. I was considering just throwing it in a keg and adding some frozen fruit juice concentrate, maybe cranking up the carbs and make it sparkling to add some interest.

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated. If the batch is bust, I'm really only out couple of bucks for the ingredients, so no big deal.

MedsenFey

Recipes 

How old is this batch now?

__________________
"Our results are merely the result of carefully managing the transformation of bee spit into yeast excrement."
--- Wayneb

Lovemongre

Recipes 

About six months.

CandleWineProject

Recipes 

cooking apples is bad for cider, so I can't imagine it is good to do to pears. What a lot of ciders do is ferment apple juice, and then backsweeten with pear juice to get the pear flavor.

Lovemongre

Recipes 

The batch was really just an afterthought. We started out making pearsauce by simmering in a little apple juice unitl just soft enough to run through a food mill. We had way too much to can so I figured I'd throw in some yeast and see what happened. I wouldn't say that the flavor is bad per se, just weak. I will say the bouquet is less than appetizing. I'm interested to know about the back-sweetening. Is there a science to this or do you just add juice and or sugar to taste? What stops the fermentation from starting up again? Thanks for the response!

CandleWineProject

Recipes 

Sounds like you could have done a pear sauce instead!

I don't know much about back sweetening with juice. First you would ferment apple juice dry, and then stabilize it, usually with chemicals, though age does help, too. Then you would add juice, but I don't know how much it takes. Apple cider is sometimes so mild, and other fruits don't do so well fermenting. I've seen it done that way with pear, cherry, black current, pomegranate, and probably some others.