IPA Mead (Simcoe Metheglin)

I'm gonna brew this tomorrow unless someone here stops me!

3 gallon recipe:

Ingredients:
6 lbs wildflower honey
0.25 oz Millenium hops (pellet, 17.4% AA) at 60 min
1 oz Simcoe hops (pellet, 13% AA) at 15 min
1 oz Simcoe hops at 1 min
1 oz Czech Saaz hops (whole-leaf, 4.5% AA), dry hop
8 oz maltodextrin
Buckwheat honey, to taste
2 tsp yeast nutrient

US-05 dry yeast

Boil:
Do a 60-minute boil with water, maltodextrin, and Simcoe hops. While boiling water, burn/caramelize 1 lb of the wildflower honey. Strain hops from water, add yeast nutrient, and pour hop-water over burnt honey, then add remaining 5 lbs of wildflower honey. Cool to 74°F, pitch US-05, ferment completely. Rack to secondary and add dry hops for 2 weeks before bottling (i.e., after mead has cleared).

Then, the hard part:
Back-sweeten/prime with buckwheat honey to taste, then bottle in 22-oz bottles. Reserve enough to fill 2 plastic soda bottles (use first and last runnings from the bucket). When the soda bottles first begin to feel tight, open the first one to check carbonation. If adequately carbonated, pasteurize (on the stove) all the remaining glass bottles to kill the yeast. If not, give another day or two and then check the second one, and then pasteurize if satisfied. Refrigerate and enjoy some sparkling, slightly-sweet, IPA mead!

Now, I'm not even sure if back-sweetening will be necessary; I predict an OG somewhere around 1.080, but I have no idea what level of attenuation to expect out of the US-05. I know it can go to 12% ABV before pooping out, so it may make this bone-dry. It also might take forever to fully attenuate and clear. So I may just bottle it when it hits a SG of 1.018 or so, with some priming sugar, and pasteurize it when it's fully carbed. I dunno. It's an adventure!

I've made mead using S-04 and S-05. I don't have a hydrometer or use any sites so I can't give good hard facts but all of my meads (and ciders for that matter) using those two yeasts have turned out fine. The yeasts have never pooped out on me. One thing I would caution is you probably won't need to back sweeten your mead. You certainly can, but 4lbs of honey plus 1lb burned is a lot. In addition, I haven't made a bochet yet but from what I have read when you boil the honey some (not all though!) of it becomes "non-fermentable" and residual sweetness automatically remains. So you'll have some additional sugars from that too.

One more thing--be careful stove top pasteurizing. I've done it 3 times and never had a good experience. I follow the directions to the tee but bottles always explode. I tried it yesterday actually and ended up just putting the whole case of cider in the fridge after 2 bottles went ka-blewie. No one else seems to have issues though so it must be user error.

I'm excited to hear how this turns out. This is something I really want to try to make too!

I'd backsweeten with unfermentables. I really like the results, it's less work and most importantly fewer chances to mess up.

Assuming your honey is packaged and already sanitary, I wouldn't add it to the hot water because you'll lose aromatics. I'd add honey with the yeast at 74°. I've given up on priming with honey. It's romantic and sounds like a good idea, but it seems to create more sediment without really adding anything.

I wouldn't heat bottles of carbonated liquid, unless perhaps you were going to pressurize them somehow, perhaps by using a very deep stock pot? The CO2 isn't going to be very soluble at higher temps which will really up the pressure inside, but if you could equalize or mitigate that pressure some you might be OK. I know people supposedly do it, but I haven't and wouldn't.

ChasidicCalvinist said:

One more thing--be careful stove top pasteurizing. I've done it 3 times and never had a good experience. I follow the directions to the tee but bottles always explode. I tried it yesterday actually and ended up just putting the whole case of cider in the fridge after 2 bottles went ka-blewie. No one else seems to have issues though so it must be user error.

I'm excited to hear how this turns out. This is something I really want to try to make too!

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Hmm...hadn't thought about the problems of pasteurizing carbonated bottles. Well, if what you say is true and I can expect a sweet finish without back-sweetening, then I can just ferment to completion and then prime as normal, expecting carbonation to proceed normally.

My main concern was that at 2 lbs honey per gallon water, this would come out drier than the sweet meads I usually make (which use 3 lbs honey per gallon of water), and too dry to balance the hops. So I figured I'd have to back-sweeten, which would also prime the mead for carbonation, but then that would risk having the yeast eat up all the back-sweetening honey and over-carbing the mead (and also drying it out). So I figured pasteurization is the only way to reliably stop the fermentation.

But maybe it would be better to ferment out completely, back-sweeten with a non-fermentable if necessary (what should I use? Lactose?) AND add some corn sugar to carb? That way no risk of exploding bottles on the stove!

Lactose, sucralose and sorbitol are the ones in my pantry.

Yuck...sucralose? The last thing I want is a mead that tastes like diet soda. Not as bad as aspartame I suppose, but still...maybe some licorice root or stevia extract would be better, though I guess lactose is the best bet. How much lactose would you add to a really dry, bitter mead?

Can't you use sulfite to stop fermentation? Or are you against using those?

The thing is, I'd have to stop fermentation AFTER bottling, because I want it to be sparkling. I can't exactly open up the bottles when the desired level of carbonation is reached and add sulfites!

To my girlfriend and me, sucralose tastes like sugar. Soda also tastes like sugar. We don't notice a difference in flavor between sugar and sucralose. As far as sorbitol, we actually did a double blind test with the two of us. We could both detect 100% sorbitol-based fake honey, but when we mixed half real honey and half sorbitol honey we could not tell the difference from 100% real honey. The fake honey is a great backsweetener that I've used a fair bit. It tastes mostly like honey but has none of the smell of honey, but the simcoe is going to cover any honey smell anyways.

igliashon said:

The thing is, I'd have to stop fermentation AFTER bottling, because I want it to be sparkling. I can't exactly open up the bottles when the desired level of carbonation is reached and add sulfites!

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Ah yes, silly me. Carry on!

muench1 said:

To my girlfriend and me, sucralose tastes like sugar. Soda also tastes like sugar. We don't notice a difference in flavor between sugar and sucralose. As far as sorbitol, we actually did a double blind test with the two of us. We could both detect 100% sorbitol-based fake honey, but when we mixed half real honey and half sorbitol honey we could not tell the difference from 100% real honey. The fake honey is a great backsweetener that I've used a fair bit. It tastes mostly like honey but has none of the smell of honey, but the simcoe is going to cover any honey smell anyways.

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I'm not as experienced with sorbitol, but I can always identify sucralose, even when I don't know it's an ingredient or when I don't expect it to be one. From what I've read, sorbitol (along with xylitol and mannitol and the other sugar alcohols) can cause gastrointestinal upset and have a laxative-like effect in sufficient quantity. I'm not sure what that quantity is, or how much I'd be ingesting per bottle of mead if I used it to back-sweeten, but it seems like something I'd rather not mess with.

I actually don't expect that the simcoe is going to cover anything up; at least, not to my hyper-sensitive olfactory system! My girlfriend and I are both hypersensitive when it comes to smells and tastes, so I want to be really careful with my choice of backsweetener. Hopefully I won't need one! But if I do it'll probably either be lactose or stevia.

Put it into a keg and force carb after the sulfite addition. Plus, if it manages to ferment again, the pressure valve will keep it from blowing.

I don't have kegging capabilities...no room in my tiny apartment.

In my experience it really doesn't take much to backsweeten. If you want natural, non-fermentable sugar then you're probably looking at lactose. Good thing yeast is lactose-intolerant! If you have a local friend with a kegging setup and bottle filler you can beg to go to their house and use it maybe?

If you wan't to sweeten you could keg, Carbonate, add sugar, bottle, and pasteurize your beer! Though you already mentioned that was not possible.

igliashon said:

I don't have kegging capabilities...no room in my tiny apartment.

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Bummer.

Not to twist the knife, but I like to make cider and my recently built kegerator is a god send. Opens up so many options for backsweetening and carbonating.

Sorry again. Wish I had some good advice for you.

Someday, I will have an apartment large enough to accomodate a kegging setup. And a yard, where I can setup a propane burner to do my boils, so I can do larger than 3-gallon batches. But for now, I gotta keep it modest and creative.

Yeah sulfites work great if you have a keg. Bottle pasturize? Just give a water bath in a canner. They have a wire rack and everything though I imagine that if the bottles are breaking then I suggest more reading on water baths.

Alright, finally brewed this, but changed the recipe up a bit at the last minute. I went with galaxy hops instead of simcoe, because the honey I got turned out to have a very interesting fruity bouquet to it that I thought might not pair well with the resiny simcoe flavor.

3 gallons:

2 lbs caramelized raw unfiltered wildflower honey (cooked on high heat for ~45 minutes), added at flame-out
4 lbs raw unfiltered wildflower honey, added at flame-out
8 oz maltodextrin, at 60 minutes

0.25 oz millenium pellet hops, 17.4% AA, at 60 min
1 oz galaxy hop pellets, 13% AA, at 15 min
1 oz galaxy hop pellets, at 5 min
I'll probably dry hop with 1 oz of whole cascade hops for 2 weeks before bottling

2 tsp yeast nutrient at 5 minutes
Fermentis Safbrew S-33 (didn't realize I was out of US-05, and this seemed like a better choice than the S-04, T-58, or WB-06 I had on hand)

Caramelizing the honey on the stove was fine; I used my spare brew kettle and there was PLENTY of room, it foamed up a bit but didn't make it more than 1/4 of the way up the pot. The smell was amazing, it went through a lot of different phases of aroma and finally settled on campfire roasted marshmallows. I didn't quite stir it enough though, as some honey scorched onto the bottom of my pot (having a heck of a time getting it off, too!). The wildflower honey I used was already very dark to begin with, I'd say about 25-30 SRM, so the final must was pitch-black, darker even than my RIS. I think this caramelized honey is going to add a ton of flavor, though, and I'm definitely going to use caramelized honey in a few more brews...I've got a spiced winter ale recipe coming together that I think would benefit greatly from the burnt honey. I highly recommend trying it! I think this mead is going to be really something else.

One curious thing though is that the OG came out quite lower than expected, 1.066. I did some calculations and reckon I averaged 32 ppg from all the honey, not the projected 40 ppg that Hopville suggested. However, I'm not terribly concerned about this batch coming out too dry...the honey is so full-flavored that I expect it will end up plenty sweet. Nevertheless, if you do try the recipe yourself, and you don't use a really dark full-flavored honey, I'd recommend using more like 2.5 to 3 lbs of honey per gallon of water.

Excited to hear about this. I tried B' Nectar's Evil Genius and was still excited about the IDEA, but didn't like how sweet it was.