The great watermelon mead experiment

I finally got a chance to dig into a watermelon I bought last Saturday at the farmers market and found it to be mushy and overripe. Rather than whine about it, I went ahead and juiced the whole thing to make an impromptu batch of mead. Then I checked my fridge and found the only yeast I had in stock was some washed Belgian Saison and washed Jolly Pumpkin dregs. Rather than let that deter me, I figured I'd give both a shot.

I decided to make two 1.5 gallon batches. Both will be low-gravity (1.060-1.070 OG) To each batch I will add 2 lbs of wildflower honey and 72 oz of watermelon juice. Best case scenario is I have stumbled on something fabulous. Worst case scenario is I wasted $10 on honey. I will keep everyone posted as things progress.

Sounds interesting! Good luck and looking forward to progress reports

Here is the batch with Belgian Saison yeast. I put it in my unheated guest room where it's bubbling away like crazy at about 85 degrees.

Interesting Idea. I'm curious how this will turn out for you and might have to do something similar if its good

For the few of you who care, I bottled the portion brewed with saison yeast yesterday. The hot temperature threw off a lot of phenols. So much so that it was pretty much overwhelming. I ended up racking the mead to 1 gallon carboy and dry hopping it with 0.5 oz of Hallertau for 4 days. I carbed it to about 3.5 volumes of CO2. I plan on leaving it alone for a couple months and seeing where it takes me. I think the dry-hopping went a long way towards smoothing this one out. Hopefully it ends up drinkable.

It's been a couple months, and I'm curious how this turned out. I've been considering doing a mead with saison yeast, probably Wyeast 3711 French Saison. 3711 dries out a saison nicely, to around 1.003-1.006.

A greater experiment would be making the mead in the watermelon like the pumpkin meads made inside the pumpkin!

eulipion2 said:

It's been a couple months, and I'm curious how this turned out. I've been considering doing a mead with saison yeast, probably Wyeast 3711 French Saison. 3711 dries out a saison nicely, to around 1.003-1.006.

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I had my first one of these a couple nights ago. I ended up going a little too wild with the temperature, and fermented it at about 85-90 degrees. It kind of smells like rot (it'll be interesting to see if that mellows out), but it actually tastes pretty good. It's tart, super-crisp, very fruity. I just kind of plugged my nose when I went to take a sip. Doing this again, I would make two recommendations:

1) Go a little easier on the fermentation temps. Maybe scale it up to 85-90 degrees over the period of a week instead of one day.

2) I would also add the watermelon juice in secondary. The watermelon flavor was a little faint. I could almost tell it was there, but was hard to know for sure because of the strong esters given off by the saison yeast.

I'm thinking if I go the 3711 route I'll leave it in the upper 60's/low 70's. 3711 works perfectly without the ridiculous ramp-up in temperature as other saison strains. Thanks for the update!

I opened another bottle of this up tonight. The horrible smell has receded considerably (though it still doesn't smell like a bed of roses). But the fruitiness is very pronounced and very pleasant. Slightly puckery, tart aftertaste. This has gone from a questionable experiment to a qualified success. I see more meads with saison yeast in my future.