Mead "portfolio"

I'd like to make a variety of meads to create a mead portfolio of sorts. Here is the humble list I've come up with;

Plain - just honey, yeast strain(s) will be crucial.
JAOM - Well documented.
A mint mead
A coffee mead
A pomegranate / citrus melomel (in the fermentor, 1wk old!)
And a cherry mead

I'm wondering if anyone's done or heard of meads with an enormous amount of spices and hops? I want something that will kind of bring wine lovers and beer lovers together to drink a mead.

Something with cloves, and hops, and perhaps some steeped grains. Has anyone tried something like this?

Last one I did was a Pyment with juice from orange muscat grapes


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Show mead
A mead made with only honey, water, and yeast, with very limited additives.
Traditional mead
May include other ingredients to add complexity or depth, but should not feature other flavors.
Varietal mead
Mead made with honey from a single source, created by bees used to fertilize a single crop.
Melomel
Mead made with fruit; usually refers to fruits other than grapes or apples.
Metheglin
Mead made with herbs and spices.
Pyment
Meads made with grapes or blended with wine.
Cyser
Meads made with apples or blended with cider.
Braggot
Meads made with malt or blended with beer.

Traditional, show, and varietal are the same to me and I will be adding mint mead and coffee mead to this list.

IJesusChrist said:

I'm wondering if anyone's done or heard of meads with an enormous amount of spices and hops? I want something that will kind of bring wine lovers and beer lovers together to drink a mead.

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A new friend on the forum offered to send me a bottle of his spiced mead that he thought was far too extreme. Said he'd let it last a year to mellow before tossing most of it. I raised the challenge that in my experience a heavy dose of spice can take two years to mellow, but we agreed on one thing.. that overspicing is not a good idea! If I don't like the mead he's sending, I'll try to make it into a new brew, a spiced honey ale of sorts, send him a bottle back in reply. I just can't think about spilt mead!

Take heed, don't overspice mead! Or anything else, for that matter. Can't say I remember how much cinnamon I put in my dandelion wine that time it took 2 years, but I do know it didn't seem like all that much. Caution!

My first successful brew was a full-honey (no added water) mead with lime peel, ginger and wild cactus fruit juice (self-harvested). My only regret was that I made less than half a gallon of it! So far as the additions, I've found that while fresh ginger root is spicy, its mellow enough not to overpower the brew. Lime peel is now one of my favorite additions to any homebrew.. hard to describe the flavour it brings. Slight bitterness, definitely citrusey.. but not as strong as orange or lemon. I've added lime peel to about half of my mixed brews because its that good. As far as the cactus fruit juice, I'm sure many other fruits would serve just as well. Cactus pear tastes similar to passionfruit, but without the tartness. I've not done another including them, but I'm sorely tempted to go visit my mom and make a side trip to do some pure cactus fruit wine.

Hope you'll try a mead like mine, full-honey with no added water. I've never had a brew like it, before or since. Heaven in a bottle! But it also took 2 years to finish right. It was so precious to me that it took almost that long to drink! Thankfully I had other brews that were less valuable to me available by then

Good luck and..

Cheers!
~BV

P.S. Check out "mead beer" if you can.. I don't know if its on the site here. It's basically a mead that's brewed with water as well. Dilutes the flavour and alcohol content (some people go 1:3, honey to water, for about a 5% result), but it can be ready in less than 6 mo.s and keeps better than a malt beverage. Might be a good idea for someone who's willing to experiment batches, get a good idea of what you're doing before waiting over a year to find out!

Habaneros and fresh ginger root work very well together in sack meads sometimes oaked, sometimes not

BeeVomit said:

My first successful brew was a full-honey (no added water) mead with lime peel, ginger and wild cactus fruit juice (self-harvested).

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What?? How can the yeast even swim around? Or was there a large amount of the juice? And by cactus juice do you mean prickly pear fruit? The season is coming up for that, and I've always wanted to!

Yeah, prickly pear. But I say cactus fruit because that's what it is.. not everybody has seen The Jungle Book or grew up in the Southwest.. Where I'm from we even have the paw-paw, but there we call it a cherimoya. Mediterranean climate on the central coast. Mmm. I miss everything about it, especially the Spanish black olive trees that like to do a second bloom in late fall and produce huge black olives without the summer bug infestation. I cure them, myself, to go with my prickly pear picknicks.

All I know was that I had beer yeast in full honey for almost a full year before I added anything else. Seems to me he yeast breaks down the honey eventually because honey is pretty much just water and sugar, after all. But the sugar is so complex (having been eaten and then vomited up by bees, rechewed with enzymes, then naturally matured in wax containment ) that the yeast takes a while to do this, undo the bond the bees created, to start making alcohol out of the sugar. If there's extra water in there, I'm sure the yeastie beasties have an easier time moving around. To make sure they were doing their duty I'd sometimes swirl or shake the bottle to keep it all mixed.

My mead certainly started slow, I can tell you. Real thick to begin, but eventually becoming more like a syrup. Keeping it warm in the bathroom wasn't hard, and the warmer it was the swifter the process went. A couple of times I pulled it out of there and let the bottle sit in the California heat, protected by a towel from the sun..

Whether in mead or not, I'd definitely recommend the Prickly Pear to you. Next time I visit my mom down there I'll be harvesting as many as I can and making pure prickly pear wine. Another thing that's really available is bananas (making one here to test the project) since all the stores donate them to food banks, and there's too many that go bad for them to be stored long-term. There's also sugar dates, guavas, strawberry trees, loquats, and sapote.. just to name a few of the fruits off the beaten track. I'm game to try them all! Probably use real raw sugar cane for the "ripple" effect.

I also want to try a pineapple mead.. pineapple wine ("Wado" in Honduras) has a real healthy-feeling zing to it!

Down there on the central coast I've been fortunate to find wild bee colonies, and I also know quite a few people with large beekeeping operations.. I know who to visit to get a gallon of unprocessed honey for under 30 bucks. Up here in Washington, its a common backyard hobby and I'm learning what I can. I certainly plan on having a regular source of honey in the near future Besides being great for mead, honey just happens to be one of my favorite substances on the planet

And having happy bees around is a great bonus!

I'm still confused... Honey is hypotonic, meaning basically any organism can't live on it (in it) as it will suck all the water out, and they will shrivel up and die. You literally just had honey and yeast? Thats it? Nothing else?!

IJesusChrist said:

I'm still confused... Honey is hypotonic, meaning basically any organism can't live on it (in it) as it will suck all the water out, and they will shrivel up and die. You literally just had honey and yeast? Thats it? Nothing else?!

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That's so.. but the yeast I used had been in a beer that I'd chucked cuz it was just too hoppy.. technically my first brew. I was so upset with my failure (but then I found out plenty of IPA fans woulda killed for a brew that damned bitter) that I scooped out some of the yeast sediment from the bottom of my bucket and drowned it in honey in a 24 oz. bottle. So I guess it was strong enough? or there was enough liquid with it that it could survive? Until I added the prickly pear juice there wasn't anything else I put in.. though the way you put it, I probably would have been smarter to at least put maybe half a cup of water in there.

Like I said, honey's basically sugar-water with some added processing. My (soggy) yeast survived probably just long enough to start the conversion of the sugars, thereby freeing up the water. That's the best I can figure. It wasn't a planned brew, really, so maybe it was just a fluke? I don't know.

My guess is that the cactus fruit juice behaved like additional water and diluted the sugars in the honey enough for fermentation to occur. Honey is really no more than highly concentrated sugars , so concentrated that you don't need to preserve them in any way to prevent fermentation or spoilage from taking place. Quite the opposite: You do need to dilute the honey with some liquid (could be water, could be fruit juice) in order to allow the yeast to bud and ferment the sugars. I am making a mead in which I used papaya juice to dilute the honey (about 3 lbs of honey in one gallon of papaya juice).

bernardsmith said:

My guess is that the cactus fruit juice behaved like additional water and diluted the sugars in the honey enough for fermentation to occur.

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I didn't add the cactus fruit juice until the mead was already almost a year underway, and it was already behaving like a light syrup. So that's not it.. but I do know that it started behaving like a regular liquid quite soon after diluting it with the juice.

Papaya is good fresh, but you ever have it overripe? I'm not sure that's gonna be a nice flavour. If you remember me by the time its finished, let me know, ok?

Cheers!

You know honey behaves differently, more fluid, when its warm.. I did keep the stuff rather comfortable in there. Mayhaps that has to do with the yeast's vigour in such a harsh environment?

Hm, perhaps the sludge of yeast had enough volume to ferment in that area, and as fermentation spread - additional water was produced and the yeast could move around.

A peculiar way to ferment, for sure.

Its easy to accumulate a portfolio, since it takes awhile to mellow out (the hard part is being patient enough to wait) Sofar, since starting meads mid last yr, my Mead portfolio that i have (1 gallon each)

-JAO
-JAO with Craisins
-JQG
-Berry Blend
-Cranberry Pomegranate
-Orange Blossom Honey Mango Tangerine
-Blackberry
-Grapefruit
-Cherry
-Strawberry Kiwi
-Crazy 6 Gallon batch of Cyser, aka "Aiming Fluid"
-Currently fermenting Blueberry Pomegranate

I highly recommend lime peel as an addition to your sweet berry/stone fruit types.. blackberry, cherry, pomegranate, etc. I really like it with apple, myself.

BeeVomit said:

I highly recommend lime peel as an addition to your sweet berry/stone fruit types.. blackberry, cherry, pomegranate, etc. I really like it with apple, myself.

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Do you prepare it as 'zest' - where you grate it off? or do you literally put the peel in - pith and all?

Secondary? Primary?

I usually put in a whole lime sliced up, actually. But my first go was the peel, as you would peel an orange. I don't use primary/secondary ferments, but usually keep my whole ingredients during the entire ferment process. So I wouldn't know that.. but I think the peel takes a while to combine with the brew, so secondary? Just a guess. If you wanted just for the primary, zest might be okay. I like it cuz it gives a very mellow, bitter citrus quality.. just a shade of it. For a five gallon batch? 5 whole peels' worth (or zest) or 5 whole fruits. Make sure to use organic, since all farm chemicals/pesticides accumulate primarily into the skins of fruits, citrus especially.

BeeVomit said:

I usually put in a whole lime sliced up, actually. But my first go was the peel, as you would peel an orange. I don't use primary/secondary ferments, but usually keep my whole ingredients during the entire ferment process. So I wouldn't know that.. but I think the peel takes a while to combine with the brew, so secondary? Just a guess. If you wanted just for the primary, zest might be okay. I like it cuz it gives a very mellow, bitter citrus quality.. just a shade of it. For a five gallon batch? 5 whole peels' worth (or zest) or 5 whole fruits. Make sure to use organic, since all farm chemicals/pesticides accumulate primarily into the skins of fruits, citrus especially.

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I added 5 local oranges (found a tree of divine oranges, I can't believe how good they are - almost a raspberry flavor) to mine. Very little orange flavor came about, but a bit of a strong pith-derived bitterness. Thats why I was wondering about the lime.

I'll give it a go on my next fruit based mead, though. Thanks

Organic limes usually have very little pith, especially compared to an orange. I get a good balance of citrus undertones with little pithy bitterness. Good job on those oranges. I'm happy to know when it comes to oranges I should stick with the zest instead of the whole peel.