I have read the 50 pages of making Bochet on this list, very fun reading. I have not made this mead yet but it is now on my list, especially since I now have my own bee hives and hope to have extra honey.
1) I would like to offer another possible way to carmalize honey. We used to make milk caramel by boiling a unopened can of sweetened concentrated milk, taking hours and having to make sure the can was always underwater. I thought about that for a while and decided a pressure cooker would do all the work for me. I tried it and it worked very well. I think we can take honey in quart mason jars with canning lids, put them inside a big pressure cooker and carmalize the honey. A lot safer than using a stovetop, no mess to clean up, you wont catch anything on fire and if you make an extra quart or two you can save it to backsweeten your mead or to put on your icecream.
2) Cheap honey probably has high fructose corn syrup in it, so you are carmalizing sugar and not really honey. Better to make sure you use real honey from a local beekeeper. You also probably dont know where your cheap honey came from, it could be one of those countries that has been adding melamine to thier baby formula and pet food.
3) The glucose/fructose ratio could be important in how the honey carmalizes, a higher glucose honey variety would likely carmalize faster and have more carmalized flavor than a low glucose honey. Honey that crystalizes quickly like clover and alfalfa would be good choice for Bochets.
4) High starting gravity over 1.120 seems to cause a lot of problems for mead makers. We like to start at 1.10 and if we want higher alcohol levels feed more honey into the must to increase it 0.01 each step. The fermentation rages early and eats the extra honey easily. Much more control of where the mead stops on the gravity scale than having it stall before you want it to stop. The reason I mention this is that after carmalizing, are yeast able to eat the carmalized glucose? Maybe they are just eating the uncarmalized fructose? If so then our alcohol levels are not what would be predicted from the hydrometer readings?
WVMJ
1) I would like to offer another possible way to carmalize honey. We used to make milk caramel by boiling a unopened can of sweetened concentrated milk, taking hours and having to make sure the can was always underwater. I thought about that for a while and decided a pressure cooker would do all the work for me. I tried it and it worked very well. I think we can take honey in quart mason jars with canning lids, put them inside a big pressure cooker and carmalize the honey. A lot safer than using a stovetop, no mess to clean up, you wont catch anything on fire and if you make an extra quart or two you can save it to backsweeten your mead or to put on your icecream.
2) Cheap honey probably has high fructose corn syrup in it, so you are carmalizing sugar and not really honey. Better to make sure you use real honey from a local beekeeper. You also probably dont know where your cheap honey came from, it could be one of those countries that has been adding melamine to thier baby formula and pet food.
3) The glucose/fructose ratio could be important in how the honey carmalizes, a higher glucose honey variety would likely carmalize faster and have more carmalized flavor than a low glucose honey. Honey that crystalizes quickly like clover and alfalfa would be good choice for Bochets.
4) High starting gravity over 1.120 seems to cause a lot of problems for mead makers. We like to start at 1.10 and if we want higher alcohol levels feed more honey into the must to increase it 0.01 each step. The fermentation rages early and eats the extra honey easily. Much more control of where the mead stops on the gravity scale than having it stall before you want it to stop. The reason I mention this is that after carmalizing, are yeast able to eat the carmalized glucose? Maybe they are just eating the uncarmalized fructose? If so then our alcohol levels are not what would be predicted from the hydrometer readings?
WVMJ