Cadbury Egg Easter Mead

tuner240 said:

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.

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It's likely cocoa butter from the chocolate.

Hopefully it will fall to the bottom so that I can rack off of it.

tuner240 said:

Hopefully it will fall to the bottom so that I can rack off of it.

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I've never added Cadbury eggs to anything but when I'd done chocolate porters and stouts the stuff stayed on top and was quite challenging to clean. Racking "under" it was easy enough though.

...or float to the top so I can rack under it! lol Thanks for sharing your experience.

Okay, I am finally getting a chance to catch up and start posting some of my results. This has been a very gassy mead and has required a lot of degassing. The SG was at 1.074 last night around 11pm and as of right now (10:30pm) it has dropped to 1.043 so it is fermenting. I have been aerating this mead every 2-3 hours if possible, and got rid of the sulfur smell that started not long after it started. The taste is sweet, bitter and kinda hot, with a bit of sulfur due to lack of proper oxygenation and waxy as well. A bit of aging and back sweetening should fix any issues the final product may have. I bet this turns out a lot better once all the trash has fallen out of it and racked.

EDIT: I forgot to post some pictures, the first of the waxy cocoa butter that collects like a cap on the top of the mead, and the second is a sample that I took tonight.

most chocolate does have a thin coat of food grade wax on them, thats probably what it is.

Fermentation is coming to a near end! SG at 12:30am is 1.018. Taste has already improved and is like a semisweet mead, and I have a little buzz writing this from just drinking the sample...lol Unfortunately I feel that most of the cadbury egg flavor has been lost. I've been skimming the top when I aerate to get rid of as much trash as I can before racking after fermentation. The color has went from a dark milk chocolate color to a caramel color and keeps lightening. I think that back-sweetening is going to come from a chocolate syrup of some sort to ensure that I can minimize extra crap as much as possible while achieving the dessert-sweet after dinner mead that I was hoping to finish with; and don't think that by this I am giving up on this! I will see how this ages short term to decide how I will backsweeten, if I do at all.

Hey, ya live and ya learn, but I regret nothing! Maybe one day I will try this again and try to skim the crap out from the melted eggs before adding to the must.

Well it has fermented down to 1.008, and has a sour taste to it; I think that either something in it spoiled or I infected it (which I don't want to attribute this to, considering that I am a star san fanatic). I'm getting large (2-4 inch) white bubbles forming on the top of this and the audible bubbling has picked up a lot since yesterday evening every 5 to 10 minutes (heard it but didn't think much of it). I have gotten most of the waxy cap from the top of the mead off over the last couple of days and now this. lol

I think I busted this recipe...

I need a dancing banana...

EDIT BTW, 'Google Image Search' and 'infected' don't go together

Well in reply to my own post, this is a picture that I found on another website that has an image of what was on top of my mead. The symptoms for taste are pretty much exact.

http://www.eastsidebrewers.org/index.php?option=com_kunena&func=view&catid=6&id=1159&Itemid=86

This makes me sad too.

I think you should remake this recipe but this time don't mess with it. After you melt the eggs and mix it up just pitch the yeast just leave it alone. I've never had any good come from continual poking of an active ferment, swirling a sealed container to rouse things is as far as I go. Any mead that finishes in under a week would have me concerned as well.

brewingmeister said:

I think you should remake this recipe but this time don't mess with it. After you melt the eggs and mix it up just pitch the yeast just leave it alone. I've never had any good come from continual poking of an active ferment, swirling a sealed container to rouse things is as far as I go. Any mead that finishes in under a week would have me concerned as well.

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I think that eventually I'm going to do this again and just aerate the mead instead of pulling the crap off. And as for finishing in less than a week, most of my mead's do and they have all been fine. I prefer a vigorous fermentation using more yeast with proper nutrients. This has never affected the predetermined recipes that I have made before.

On a side note I will try to get the eggs stocked up before Easter passes us by to try this again in the near future. Considering that I used extra honey that I had sitting around and my only real investment was the yeast and the eggs I can't consider this a real loss, considering all I learned.

:-( I have my eggs vacuum packed and frozen until I am ready to get this started.

I hope, considering the holiday, that your egg mead has died so that all other egg meads might live.

Sorry this didn't work.

Yeah that's no bueno. If you try it again, ignore the fatty stuff till it's racking time. That may lower the change for infection.

The words of encouragement are good to hear, and hopefully I will get that new batch started soon. Today I bought the honey and juice needed for Joe's Quick Grape Mead so that is what I'm going to be handling over the next week. Maybe after that... Who knows?

On a side note, does anyone know how to get previous batch scents out of your fermenting bucket? lol

tuner240 said:

On a side note, does anyone know how to get previous batch scents out of your fermenting bucket? lol

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Baking soda and hot water or a soak in powdered brewers wash solution has always worked.

Thank you