nebben
Well-Known Member
About a month ago, I became an apiarist. Now I'm contemplating what to do with all this honey that I'll be harvesting later in the summer and in the fall.
I was thinking about making a mead using only ingredients sourced in my garden, and water from some yet to be determined exotic mountain location within a hundred miles or so of my house.
From what I've read, clear water mountain streams tend to be relatively clean, provided they aren't near human activity (busy camp-sites, roads, mines...etc.). That being said, I still usually will treat water from any source in the wildnerness using my Miox water purifying device (chlorine) or by boiling.
Now, I suppose I could just make it easy and boil any wild-water additions that I would put into the must, which would kill any wild parasites or bugs in the water. But what I'm curious about is if instead of boiling, I could just mix in my honey+ingredients in the raw/untreated mountain water, then just pitch the yeast. Does the high ethanol environment of ~10-14% effectively kill any microorganisms that may have originally been in the water?
Just a theory....I'm bored as hell here at work today.
I was thinking about making a mead using only ingredients sourced in my garden, and water from some yet to be determined exotic mountain location within a hundred miles or so of my house.
From what I've read, clear water mountain streams tend to be relatively clean, provided they aren't near human activity (busy camp-sites, roads, mines...etc.). That being said, I still usually will treat water from any source in the wildnerness using my Miox water purifying device (chlorine) or by boiling.
Now, I suppose I could just make it easy and boil any wild-water additions that I would put into the must, which would kill any wild parasites or bugs in the water. But what I'm curious about is if instead of boiling, I could just mix in my honey+ingredients in the raw/untreated mountain water, then just pitch the yeast. Does the high ethanol environment of ~10-14% effectively kill any microorganisms that may have originally been in the water?
Just a theory....I'm bored as hell here at work today.