Cadbury Egg Easter Mead

So I was walking through Walmart tonight and I soon realized that Easter is almost upon us, and also the time for my yearly self-treat: The Cadbury Creme Egg. So through my hazed sugar frenzy, I thought, why not make a Cadbury Creme Egg Mead? There were three different Eggs to choose from as well, original, caramel and chocolate. Was thinking about a trial batch this year of the original and see how it goes a year from now. Now here is where I would like some help; how many eggs per gallon should be melted and used? I was thinking something like this:

3# Local Orange-Blossom
staggered nutrients
15 Cadbury Creme Eggs (Primary)
White Labs Liquid Sweet Mead Yeast
Water to 1 Gallon
1 tsp Acid Blend

10 Cadbury Creme Eggs (Secondary post fermentation)
~1# Local Orange-Blossom (to taste)

I got some inspiration and help from this thread,

https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f30/our-chocolate-mead-experiment-94358/

Does this sound appealing to anyone, and would you make any changes to the recipe? I don't plan on starting this for another month (waiting for tax returns, planning a couple of meads) or so, but will stock up on the eggs ahead of time.

Thoughts?

This sounds absolutely great, keep me posted on results.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but it is most likely that the fats and milk solids will separate and spoil.. It would be a lot easier to make a cocao and caramel mead out of burnt sugar and raw cocao to get the same taste. Maybe someone more experienced can correct me if I am wrong.

What have you got to lose man? Do it for science, and take plenty of pictures.

oldmate said:

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but it is most likely that the fats and milk solids will separate and spoil.. It would be a lot easier to make a cocao and caramel mead out of burnt sugar and raw cocao to get the same taste. Maybe someone more experienced can correct me if I am wrong.

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Well what if when I added the egg mixture to the must, I (forgive me here) boiled some water, honey and eggs and skimmed the top to get rid of the solids and perishables? Or just boiled some water with the eggs in it and skimmed that, and added the honey afterwards?

Beardsly said:

What have you got to lose man? Do it for science, and take plenty of pictures.

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I will take pics, even if I have to go the bochet route with boiled honey and backflavor with caramel/chocolate mix. I wanted to do a bochet anyway...

tuner240 said:

Does this sound appealing to anyone, and would you make any changes to the recipe?

Thoughts?

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Appealing... I'm not sure but I wouldn't necessarily smack a sample away.
Recipe wise the egg to honey ratio seems off. I never thought I'd say that. 3 lbs honey to 15 eggs seems like a lot of eggs for one gallon batch.
The orange blossom sounds good but seems a waste to put it with eggs.
I also prefer a drier beverage so I would opt for 1118 or 1116 yeasties.

I'm interested to see where this goes.

Are you planning on fermenting it to dry and then backsweeten it with what you're putting into the secondary? That seems like a lot to backsweeten with.

brewingmeister said:

Appealing... I'm not sure but I wouldn't necessarily smack a sample away.
Recipe wise the egg to honey ratio seems off. I never thought I'd say that. 3 lbs honey to 15 eggs seems like a lot of eggs for one gallon batch.
The orange blossom sounds good but seems a waste to put it with eggs.
I also prefer a drier beverage so I would opt for 1118 or 1116 yeasties.

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I like this feedback, and you're right. Now that I have had time to sleep off my sugar buzz, that is too many eggs. Maybe I should skip the eggs in the primary and add to the post fermentation secondary and use about 10 eggs. I also chose the particular yeast because I want this to finish sweet. I'm also hoping that a tiny bit of the orange blossom comes through as I feel that would add a nice complement to the taste, as this would mean that I would have to back sweeten less .

rowsdower44 said:

I'm interested to see where this goes.

Are you planning on fermenting it to dry and then backsweeten it with what you're putting into the secondary? That seems like a lot to backsweeten with.

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Maybe with something like this I will ferment dry and backsweeten, so that the flavors that are added post ferment stand out. As far as the amount of honey used, It will probably be less, but I am shooting for a sweeter mead here. It's an Easter mead after all.

I use chocolate covered cherry cordials to make wine and they have a creamy sugary filling similar to the Cadbury Creme Egg. It is one of the most delicious wines, sinfully sweet, all residual sugar.

I looked at what the egg weighs and it apparently is 34gm, so you will have 510gm per gallon. I know the CCCC wine uses 8#/gallon, but no addl sugar source.

Scroll down to November 11 and you will see the recipe... http://winemaking.jackkeller.net/wineblog8.asp

Go for it!

*Sara*

tuner240 said:

Well what if when I added the egg mixture to the must, I (forgive me here) boiled some water, honey and eggs and skimmed the top to get rid of the solids and perishables? Or just boiled some water with the eggs in it and skimmed that, and added the honey afterwards?

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I don't think they actually have egg parts in them. My wife makes a homemade version and uses corn syrup. Are you going to break the shells or just let the yeasties find the goo themselves?

You might be able to skip the yeast nutrient as these things are so darn nutritious

If I were you I would just scoop out the middle of The eggs and use that sweet white and yellow stuff that's so good for dunking chips in to back sweeten and find some thing else for the chocolate cos cadburys chocolate is not even chocolate its just brown milk which can't be good for mead.

Sara, I think that I just hit the jackpot with that recipe, thank you very much! So what you're saying here is that I should look into MORE Cadbury Creme eggs per gallon? I see that 510 grams = 1.12 #'s, and they used 8 #'s per gallon. If I went with 8 #'s of eggs that would be around 107 eggs total, and I think that may be a bit much...lol (I know that I'm comparing apples to oranges here). With that in mind, what I would think is a more reasonable quantity would be around maybe, say... 50 eggs total per gallon and cut the honey back to 1 to 1.5 #'s? Which would effectively be 10 eggs per 750ml bottle, and that sounds to me like it would turn out very sweet. That conundrum aside, I think that I will follow the process of pouring boiling water over the eggs to melt them and introduce the rest of the ingredients to the must after cooling to room temperature. The recipes are close enough that I may consider following closely to the racking schedule described in the CCCC mead. And as for the STA, maybe just add a bit of nutrients to the initial must before the pitching of the yeast, just to help things along. And mooney, backsweetening with just the gooey centers sounds like a good idea too. This is really coming together nicely.

While I don't have 50 let alone 100 eggs in front of me I can't imagine the mass of either fitting into a one gal jug. Have they gotten smaller than I remember?

brewingmeister said:

While I don't have 50 let alone 100 eggs in front of me I can't imagine the mass of either fitting into a one gal jug. Have they gotten smaller than I remember?

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I was going to pour boiling (or near boiling) water over them to melt them.

Melting them wasn't what I was questioning. It was the fact that I just don't see how you are going to get 50+ eggs, water to melt them and honey all in a one gal jug. Not to mention room for fermentation.

If you said jelly beans or skittles, no problem but eggs are more like a golf ball...or a small actual egg.

brewingmeister said:

Melting them wasn't what I was questioning. It was the fact that I just don't see how you are going to get 50+ eggs, water to melt them and honey all in a one gal jug. Not to mention room for fermentation.

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Ah, I see. I got ahead of myself here. May be I should back off of 50 eggs to something like 10 -15 and backsweeten with the melted eggs/water to fill headspace?

Instead of back sweetening I would go the opposite route and put all the fermentables in at the beginning. Start with a real high gravity that so there's no way the yeast can eat it all. That way you could eliminate the possibility of restarting fermentation when adding more fermentables on the back end.

brewingmeister said:

Instead of back sweetening I would go the opposite route and put all the fermentables in at the beginning. Start with a real high gravity that so there's no way the yeast can eat it all. That way you could eliminate the possibility of restarting fermentation when adding more fermentables on the back end.

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About how high should I go with the gravity reading for the initial ferment to allow for some residual sweetness? I understand that this will be different for each yeast and is a broad question, but a ballpark would be appreciated. I've come to an understanding that letting them go dry and backsweetening is a good practice to prevent restarted fermentation.

EDIT Okay, so I think that I answered my own question with a little research here:
http://www.brewboard.com/index.php?showtopic=93648
So, knowing that the White Labs Liquid Sweet Mead Yeast can go to 15% abv, in a 5 gallon batch I would need 15 #'s to finish the yeast dry with no sweetness, and 18#'s total to leave 24 pts of residual sweetness, or a final gravity of 1.024 since each additional pound of honey adds ~8pts of gravity (Of course these values can be divided by 5 to get amounts for a 1 gallon batch). Now to figure out how to calculate the quantity of fermentables in the eggs.

Or I could just slowly add the melted egg mixture to the must to get the desired gravity measurement needed to give residual sweetness to the mead. I got it know. Sorry for writing down my thoughts and whatnot here, just makes it easier for me to come back to later.

brewingmeister, thanks for putting me on the right track.

When you make this it would be great if you could post pictures of the process plus the finished product in the fermenter. Also an updated recipe of what you use and do would be great.

ThirstyVine said:

When you make this it would be great if you could post pictures of the process plus the finished product in the fermenter. Also an updated recipe of what you use and do would be great.

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I plan on doing just that.

I did use Champagne yeast with the CCCC wine. It was a slow ferment due to the high gravity (will check notes a bit later). I did lose perhaps 15% volume over time with racking and foam off the top. I will look at FG 'later today'.
You may actually want to step feed with creme egg-water, or use as topping up liquid. You will have gross fudge lees, so maybe make two gallons! I used a 12% chocolate cherry wine which had 4oz dry weight per gallon of Droste unsweetened cocoa powder in primary as my topping up liquid. But a traditional mead would be great for your.

I just thought the recipe would give you an idea, and an indication that it should work out. I would not use a sweet mead yeast on this, stuff is finicky as he11.

I would take a look at sugar carbs on the eggs vs the ccc's, just to get an idea.

Oh, and use a bucket for primary, you will be glad you did! I am going on an egg hunt tomorrow, will make a gallon with you!

Still think you will have a hit!

Okay, I decided to determine the amount of eggs needed to get some sweetness in the mead. I heated up 4 cups of water to no more than 130F and constantly stirred in 3 eggs until completely dissolved. At that temperature (~125F) I got a gravity reading of 1.020.

I don't know if a room temperature reading will be any different, but I will report back shortly with the results.

EDIT Okay, since I need to get to sleep, and the mixture was near room temperature, I decided to take a couple more readings. I got 1.024 and and then 1.022. Both times I made sure to really stir the mixture up good with my brew-baster before pulling a sample for the cylinder. I know that the hydrometer is not an extremely accurate piece of measuring equipment, but I think that I will take the happy medium and say 1.022. So for 22 pts of gravity in a 1 gallon carboy, you will need 12 eggs (or there about). And for the curious, the mixture smelled absolutely DIVINE. More math and thought is needed to determine actual ratio of fermentables and I will tackle that tomorrow.

Yeah it's kinda hard predicting an outcome when different conditions, ingredients (unknown eggs and the like) and yeasts are used. The 3lbs per gal is a solid base recipe though.

If you do use the sweet mead liquid yeast make up a starter to hit the ground running.

Hell if you were closer I'd provide some honey for this egg laced meadstrosity.

...I like that sample cylinder btw.

brewingmeister said:

Yeah it's kinda hard predicting an outcome when different conditions, ingredients (unknown eggs and the like) and yeasts are used. The 3lbs per gal is a solid base recipe though.

If you do use the sweet mead liquid yeast make up a starter to hit the ground running.

Hell if you were closer I'd provide some honey for this egg laced meadstrosity.

...I like that sample cylinder btw.

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Will do. And I appreciate the kindness of your offer, even though I don't live close to nowhere. If you see Courage the cowardly dog, say "Hi" for me, lol.

saramc said:

I did use Champagne yeast with the CCCC wine. It was a slow ferment due to the high gravity (will check notes a bit later). I did lose perhaps 15% volume over time with racking and foam off the top. I will look at FG 'later today'.
You may actually want to step feed with creme egg-water, or use as topping up liquid. You will have gross fudge lees, so maybe make two gallons! I used a 12% chocolate cherry wine which had 4oz dry weight per gallon of Droste unsweetened cocoa powder in primary as my topping up liquid. But a traditional mead would be great for your.

I just thought the recipe would give you an idea, and an indication that it should work out. I would not use a sweet mead yeast on this, stuff is finicky as he11.

I would take a look at sugar carbs on the eggs vs the ccc's, just to get an idea.

Oh, and use a bucket for primary, you will be glad you did! I am going on an egg hunt tomorrow, will make a gallon with you!

Still think you will have a hit!

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Sorry I missed you, I use a bucket for all my primaries. It just makes everything easier. And about the yeast, may I ask why not and what you recommend in its place?

tuner240 said:

Sorry I missed you, I use a bucket for all my primaries. It just makes everything easier. And about the yeast, may I ask why not and what you recommend in its place?

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Every time I work with sweet mead yeast it takes an enormously long time to ferment, to the point that you think you stalled. And I know mead can take a bit to drop those final points, but this was way beyond that norm...but with mead it is set it and forget it! It worked out, I just hated thinking I was in a stall.
If you are going high gravity, step feed the must, staggered nutrient. Plus, the smack pack one always fizzles out and I end up pitching a pkg of K1. The White Labs works better for me. But it would make for a nice mead, but there are other options out there. Pasteur Champagne turned out well in the CCCC wine. I know Cote de Blanc does well with chocolate ferments, and K1V. Here is yeast chart... http://winemakermag.com/guide/yeast, I use it frequently when crafting, plotting an OG with goal of alc toxicity and a residual sugar.

For those inquiring minds.. Each 34gm egg also has 25g sugar. The fondant filling of the egg includes sugar, corn syrup, vanillin, invert sugar and a small amount of egg whites and the artificial coloring Yellow Number 5. The milk chocolate used in the egg is made from sugar, cocoa butter, milk, chocolate, vanilla and soya lecithin.

QueenAnn Dark Choc Cherry Cordials, serving size 38gm, aka two pieces, which has 25g sugar. Ingredients: Sugar, Dark Chocolate (Sugar, Cocoa Mass, Cocoa Butter, Anhydrous Milk Fat, PGPR [an Emulsifier], Soya Lecithin [an Emulsifier], and Vanillin [An Artificial Flavor], Milk), Cherries (Cherries, Corn Syrup, High Fructose Corn Syrup, Citric Acid, Natural & Artificial Flavor, FD&C Red 40, Potassium Sorbate [preservative], Sodium Benzoate [preservative], and Sulfur Dioxide [preservative]), Corn Syrup, Dark Coating (Sugar, Partially Hydrogenated Soybean and Cottonseed Oils, Cocoa, Chocolate, Soya Lecithin [an Emulsifier]), Invertase, Artificial Flavor.

I was so tired last night, I should have remembered the basics and gone back to the yeast section in my copy of the complet meadmaker. Thank you for your suggestions, and I think that I will go with the Cote de Blanc in hopes for the residual sweetness that I am aiming for. I'm going to try to get this together this weekend. I think that I am going for 3# of the orange blossom (111 pts) and 16 eggs (~33 pts, total estimated gravity is 1.144) in primary along with the acid blend and the staggered nutrients.

EDIT Since an SG of 1.110 is 14.3% (the yeast tolerance), and I would have a projected SG of 1.144, the final should end up around 1.034. Would this be too sweet? I mean, this is kinda what I am aiming for. Thoughts on the residual sweetness?

tuner240 said:

EDIT Since an SG of 1.110 is 14.3% (the yeast tolerance), and I would have a projected SG of 1.144, the final should end up around 1.034. Would this be too sweet? I mean, this is kinda what I am aiming for. Thoughts on the residual sweetness?

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My FG on CCCC is 1.030

saramc said:

My FG on CCCC is 1.030

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Awesome. I'm thinking of going with a pound less of honey and using eggs to substitute the points for more flavor.

Well I started this mead today, and I am hoping for the best! Ended up using only 2# of honey (three different kinds I had laying around, 1.25# of wildflower, 0.75# of orange blossom and 0.25# of crystallized clover honey. Measurements are approx), 11 eggs (didn't want to use this many, was hoping for more gravity than they gave, brewingmeister you were spot on about it being hard to predict the outcome), 0.75 cups of pure sugar to give me a final SG of 1.100 (predicted alc 13%) and a campden tablet. I will pitch cote de blanc tomorrow along with the nutrients and energizer. I plan on using the full contents of the yeast package as well as following hightest's STA guide. Acid blend will be added in the end to taste.

Edit: The last egg you see there was payment for SWMBO, as she was my camera-woman.

Nice, good to see this underway. Which variety of eggs did you go with?

I went with original.

Oooh, I was wondering about this! I saw eggs for a dime yesterday, thing I may grab some tomorrow. Thinking about using chocolate mead for topping up when the time comes.

I was thinking about this project as well, today, buying cadbury eggs to prep for the visitation of the Risen Bunny and all.

Stray thought: I would think this might go better as a port than a 13% sipper. Maybe top up with some Godiva liqueur?

saramc said:

Oooh, I was wondering about this! I saw eggs for a dime yesterday, thing I may grab some tomorrow. Thinking about using chocolate mead for topping up when the time comes.

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I would have gotten this underway sooner but the last month has kept me busy...

Unferth said:

I was thinking about this project as well, today, buying cadbury eggs to prep for the visitation of the Risen Bunny and all.

Stray thought: I would think this might go better as a port than a 13% sipper. Maybe top up with some Godiva liqueur?

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I got my eggs at Walmart in 5 packs for 2.88 a pack (CHEAP!!), just throwing that out there. And I would like to see how these variants turn out as well.

You saying "CHEAP" made my mind wander ... how about Peeps Mead?

LBussy said:

You saying "CHEAP" made my mind wander ... how about Peeps Mead?

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I like the way you think

You could use this as a label:

Okay, after pitching my yeast I realized that I forgot to say that the finished must qty BEFORE pitching was ~5L or 1.2 - 1.3 gallons. More importantly, as I stirred the must during the dehydration period for the yeast I noticed that there was a thick waxy/oily residue that was forming on my stirring utensil. I assume this is preservatives from the eggs and wanted to warn anyone attempting this to be aware. Thinking that maybe the eggs should be skimmed for trash after being melted and before added to the must? I didn't notice it while the melted egg mixture was hot (obviously) and it wouldn't form until the mixture cooled off so waiting until the egg/water mix is cool and skimming for trash is a possible solution.