Blackberry Bochet

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xpionage

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I think I'm going to give this a go tomorrow. Never made a bochet but I read in fatbloke blog that he cooked the honey in a pressure cooker and I think I'm going to try that too :).

Recipe:
1.5 Kg Honey (cooked in the pressure cooker)
900 grams of blackberries
water to 5L
Lalvin D-47

What do you guys think:D
 
Today was the day to try and make a bochet :D

Got up early to cook the honey in the pressure cooker and the end result was this:

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I cooked it for 2 hours.

4 hours later(after the honey was cold) I warmed about 2L of water and thawed the blackberries, mashed them and add them to the jug.
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S.G. of the water + blackberries 1.010.
Added the honey to the jug and add the rest of the water and took a gravity reading, S.G. 1.120, good for a sweet wine like I pretended.
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The fermentation started about 1H after pitching the yeast.

Happy brews :D
 
Hrahn1995 said:
update us. i love this idea, i will have to try it in blackberry season!

Im really looking forward to this batch, i hope this one is the one im going to brew every year :D
 
What a coincidence. I just finished cooking the honey for my own blackberry bochet a few minutes ago. I'm letting it cool before pouring it into the primary jug.

I did it a little different. I used a pound of raw honey, a pound of dark "roast" honey, and a pound of medium "roast" honey. The difference in the flavor of the three different "roasts" of honey is huge. Of course the raw tastes like raw honey. The darker of the reduced honeys tastes very much like toasted marshmallows while the lighter reduced honey has a caramel flavor. The cooked honeys also have a red color to them.

There's just over a pound of blackberries. I don't know how well they will carry through. I may end up adding more at some point if there's room in the jug. I did add pectic enzyme to extract more flavor from the berries.

The brew store my wife visited for the yeast was out of the White Labs WLP720 sweet mead yeast that I wanted to use. They guy (wrongly, I think) sold her Lalvin EC-1118 as a substitute. The two yeasts have completely different characteristics. So we'll see how it goes.

I'm curious about cooking the honey in the pressure cooker. What is the advantage supposed to be? Other than not splashing yourself with scalding honey. I might try that next time.
 
In all the posts about Bochet we have read it seemed to take a long time to get the honey to burn, they always made a big deal out of the last step about adding water to it at the end and being careful you didnt splash it up and burn yourself, and if you went to far in burning it a bitter smokey taste could show up that takes a long time to age out.

Many years ago we made caramel using sweetened condensed milk put in a big pot of boiling water, you were not supposed to let the water level drop below the top of the lid or bad things would happen (I never found out what bad things as I watched it like a hawk). I got to thinking there has to be a better way. I had a pressure cooker. I dropped them into the cooker, fired it up, timed it for an hour, cooled it, the cans did not explode as some people predicted who dont know how pressure cookers work, and we made perfect caramel doing it that way.

After I read about people making Bochet I was like man I dont have a huge pot to burn it off in, I dont like to have to watch things cook for hours and then guess when they are dont, and I dont want too much smokey flavor that takes years to age out. I thought why not try to pressure cooker again. In about an hour timed when the jiggly thing starts to move on top is all it took for the mead to caramelize. The advantages are no over burning the honey, the water stays in so you dont have to add water to get the honey to flow again, the canning jars we used sealed so it would keep them sterile for as long as we needed which makes it nice to store some to use for backsweetening.

Is the flavor different from stovetop burn honey? Probably doesnt have as much toasted marshmallow flavors but certainly is full of caramel flavor. Other folks have used crock pots and we tried that to and it also works well just that our crock pot can only do a quart or 2 at a time. We also used a big 22 quart pressure canner that does 7 quarts at a time and that was very good also. I got a jet burner but no big pot, I am not sure the adventure of actually cooking it over a flame is worth getting burnt but people fry turkeys and dont all get hurt so we might have to give it a try, just wait until it gets to cold for the bees to fly out and find us!

WVMJ
 
So you pressure cooked the honey while it was in jars? I'm just trying to understand exactly what you did so I can try it myself to compare.

I cooked my honey on the electric stove in a medium saucepan. I was only doing a pound at a time so I didn't need a lot of space. The darker honey has a lot of toasted marshmallow flavor. The house smelled like toasted marshmallows for hours afterwards. So I don't think the method of cooking has any serious impact on the flavor. I do think the stovetop limits the quantity you can cook. If I were to try and fill my 6.5-gallon carboy with a bochet I think I'd have to get a turkey frier setup to cook the honey. There's just no way to cook twenty pounds of honey safely on the stove. It would boil over in any pot small enough to sit on the stove. But it only took less than twenty minutes to get a pound of honey to the toasted marshmallow stage. It would have taken longer than that just to get a fire going outside.

My biggest concern is reproducibility. If this bochet turns out as nice as I think it will I want to be able to duplicate it in a bigger batch.
 
yes, i just putted the jars inside the pan and added water to almost the top of the jars, not covering completely.

I didnt cooked it enough time to make it really dark but i think it depends on the pressure cooker, WVMJ obtained a black honey within 2 hours of cooking and i only got that redish color.
 
The honey I used started out much darker. I think that shows in the appearance of the must. This is right after the Great Eruption that left much of my kitchen covered in blackberry.

blackberry bochet by SouthernGorilla, on Flickr

I'm about to caramelize a pound or so of generic honey for our next batch. It isn't enough to worry about setting up the pressure cooker. But I am thinking of trying that when we start the 6.5-gallon ginger metheglin. It would be much easier to manage the honey in jars instead of one twenty-pound lump.
 
I didnt had much sleep in the first night, hoping that mine didnt erupt like yours lol.
Much darker, awesome color. I hope my next batch of bochet has a color like that, this batch is going to be red instead of black like i wanted.
 
Funny, I want mine to be more red. It is more red than it looks in the picture. I saw it rising up into the airlock and it looked like blood. Who knows how it will look when it is done though.

Do you have a thick cap of berries on the top of your must? About the top inch of my jug is nothing but berries. When I break it up to stir the must it foams like mad. I'm going to have to stir it a couple times each day to keep it going.
 
Guys, get some primary buckets then you wont have to worry about eruptions and loosing wine!

Cooking the honey with fire is the normal method, getting it to the toasted marshmellow stage is the main goal, some people use a white plate to take samples while they are cooking their honey to judge the darkness level, much more accurate than just looking into the pot. I only have 2 batches going and started this year, my first is so good its going to be a regular must make every year. Save a little of that cooked honey to backsweeten with, it refreshes the caramelized taste at the end.

WVMJ
 
I got toasted marshmallow flavor on the electric stove. An open flame makes a difference with foods exposed directly to the heat source. But food in a pot doesn't know what's making the pot hot.

I wouldn't have had an explosion if I had set things up properly. I got stupid and paid the price. A bucket wouldn't have made a difference. I'd have still been stupid.

I can't save the cooked honey. It's too yummy. But I can always cook more if needed. I'm not sure I'll need to backsweeten at all. I'm counting on the unfermentable sugars created by the caramelization to carry through and sweeten the finished mead. Two of the three pounds of honey have been cooked.

Now that I think about it, I may have to add more raw honey at some point. Three pounds per gallon isn't much for the EC-1118 I used. And rendering some of that honey unfermentable means I have even less sugar for the yeast to convert. I guess when it slows down I'll rack it onto some more honey in the secondary.
 
Do you have a thick cap of berries on the top of your must? About the top inch of my jug is nothing but berries.

Mine is like this:
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HIRES Here

I also keep mine like this to maintain the temperature below 20ºC (Lalvin D-47 yeast)
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You could step feed your mead to obtain the sweetness you want, just keep adding honey and taking hydrometer readings to know when the yeast is killed by alcohol
 
If you look back at the picture of mine you'll see the layer of berries at the top. I think it's already created off flavors by blocking co2 from escaping. The must smells much more acidic than the other mead I have going with the same yeast.
 
SG, if you leave the seeds in to long it can lead to a bitterness that can take a long time to age out. If your berries were blocking the CO2 from escaping you would now that very quickly when your carboy popped its top and painted your ceiling red. Berries only take a couple of days to release everything, might be time to rack off of them? WVMJ
 
SG, if you leave the seeds in to long it can lead to a bitterness that can take a long time to age out. If your berries were blocking the CO2 from escaping you would now that very quickly when your carboy popped its top and painted your ceiling red. Berries only take a couple of days to release everything, might be time to rack off of them? WVMJ
Popped the top? You mean like this? :eek:

You're the second person I've read in the past thirty minutes to suggest the seeds are causing issues. I hadn't realized berries were so "dangerous". I'll go and rack it off the berries. Since oxygen is a good thing at this point I'll just use the funnel with the screen in it. The berries are still floating so I can't really rack off of them. Plus I don't have a way of filtering the seeds out of my racking gear.

*EDIT*
Just finished "racking" off the berries. Man was that a pain. I think next time I'll try to filter out the seeds before adding the berries to the must. It took forever to drain the must through the screen in the funnel. And judging by the slowdown in the fermentation I probably lost some yeast in the process. It would have been easier to filter the seeds beforehand because I could have used water to thin the juice so it would flow through the screen easier.
 
If you use a bucket as a primary you can just put the fruit in a fermentation bag and squeeze it a little every day.

When I said flame I meant cooked over a flame or electric stovetop vs in a crock pot or pressure cooker. Cooking in an open pan might be the best way to put it. The water is evaporated during the caramelization process where in a pressure cooker it all stays in there. When you cook with an open pot you have to add water back to the honey, some people have said they keep a pot of hot water on the stove and think that doesnt explode as much hitting the hot honey as cold water.

I dont think you need any more O2 now that the fermentation has been going for a while.

WVMJ
 
I'm still thinking about the pressure cooker technique. It just bothers me that you can't monitor the honey while it's cooking. Right now I cook the honey by smell. I bought a candy thermometer so I can start being more professional about it. A pressure cooker means you have to set things up and just hope for the best.

I'm surprised I couldn't detect any caramel or marshmallow flavors when I accidentally spilled some of the must on my tongue. There were plenty of those flavors in the honey when I cooked it. Maybe the blackberries are just overpowering the subtler flavors right now.

I think next time I use blackberries I'll puree them, strain out the seeds, and reduce the berries on the stove to form my own extract.
 
You can, just in a difrent way. Cook it 1h and see how it is, if its not the color that you want cook it for another hour and so on.
 
I'm not concerned about color. But I suppose it would be possible to cook it for an hour then let it cool enough to taste it. Then repeat as necessary. That seems like a lot of unnecessary work when I can get the right flavor in twenty minutes on the stove.

My blackberry seems to be smoothing back out since I removed the fruit. It has much less of an acid smell to it today. But I still don't get any of the "pastry" smells like it had before I pitched the yeast. Maybe next time I'll use more of the cooked honey or cook it darker.
 
I think the stove pot method is better and faster but for me the pressure cooker is better because I don't have a pot big enough to manage the volume of the burning hot honey, maybe I need to go shopping lol.
The smell in mine almost faded away, it had a very nice honey smell in the first week.
I didn't put any fruit inside the jug, I cooked the blackberries with some water and blended them, straining everything with sterilized gauze in the funnel but I still have something in the jug, its like a jelly.
 
You could have cooked the honey in the pressure cooker without the lid on. At least my pressure cooker also works as a regular pot if needed.

I like the idea of mashing the berries instead of putting them in the fermenter. I'll definitely try that next time. I imagine what you have in your jug right now is basically jelly. I'm pretty sure jelly is made by boiling down the fruit.

When mine gets closer to finished I'll cook some more honey to add. I want the finished product to have that same delicious smell it had in the beginning.
 
Tested the SG this morning while I was stirring the must. It's down to 1.064 in only five days. This EC-1118 lives up to Lalvin's claim of it being a fast fermenter. It started out somewhere above 1.110.

Sadly, it tastes rather grape-like.
 
You dont have to watch the pressure cooked honey, its done and dark in about an hour. The thing about checking the color while you are cooking it is the color tells you what amount of caramelization you are getting, just dabb a little from a spoon onto a clean white plate. As it gets darker you can cool it on the spoon and taste it, you dont have to let the whole batch cool because it might get thick and you would have to add water to get it cooking again and that would be a big waste of time. They are different methods with different results, if you get a good result in 20 minutes on the stove top while others go 90 minutes for theirs everyone is right, its your mead. WVMJ
 
I'm not attacking anybody's technique. I'm only trying to understand the different approaches so I can polish my own technique. Mainly I'm always looking for a way to get consistently reproducible results. If I can get the aroma and taste I want by using my pressure cooker then I'll use it. I'll have to experiment.
 
Racked mine today and added bentonite i didn't had at the start of fermentation

S.G:1.013

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Nice color!

I tested mine and got an SG of 1.010. I'm going to check it again in a couple days to see if it has stoped.
 
SG, no problem, I am trying to do the same thing. But, with honey, like grapes, its a little different every year depending on the weather etc. If only I had a big old autoclave I would fill up a bunch of gallon jugs and cook them until black and start selling it! WVMJ

I'm not attacking anybody's technique. I'm only trying to understand the different approaches so I can polish my own technique. Mainly I'm always looking for a way to get consistently reproducible results. If I can get the aroma and taste I want by using my pressure cooker then I'll use it. I'll have to experiment.
 
If only I had a big old autoclave I would fill up a bunch of gallon jugs and cook them until black and start selling it! WVMJ
Sell it as an air freshener. The biggest downside to using the pressure cooker is that you don't get that wonderful aroma throughout the house.
 
Racked mine to secondary today. Since it had no discernible honey or blackberry flavor I added both to the secondary. That was really the whole point of racking. I would have bottled it otherwise.
 
I intend to do everything I can to make sure at least part of this batch lasts six months. I'm going to leave it on this fruit for a week then filter and bottle it.
 
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