I have hesitated to post about this because I know there will be inevitable back lash over quality and the purity of mead. So let me first say that any comments regarding the quality of this honey will be ignored.
A few months ago I heard about a local farm that was getting large tote tanks of reclaimed food products for animal feed. Apparently in food production a product can only go through the system once and can not be reused when recaptured no matted how sanitary the product is. I decided to check it out and arrived to find that they had at least 3000 gallons of reclaimed honey sitting in tanks among other thinks. I'm not supposed to say what company the honey comes from but I will say that it involves granola. Since the honey has clearly been heated and smelled slightly of granola I was unsure how well it would work. They gave me 10 gallons just to try.
Now that I've done some trials with it I'm pretty sure that it contains corn syrup even though they don't list it in their ingredients. I would imagine it's cheap honey from overseas. The process that I've found works well so far is as follows...
Boil the must for sanitation and to drive off the granola aroma.
Add a little baking soda to the must for alkalinity (it needs it for whatever reason)
Cool, nutrients, and pitch ec-1118
1118 has been working well in this.
back sweeten with better quality honey if needed.
Bold flavors and bochets are a great choice for this honey.
Trust me, I know the difference between quality honey meads and meads made from the garbage honey. There is defiantly a quality difference but it's been fun to practice my techniques and experiment. Plus I'm using a product which would otherwise be thrown away in massive quantities.
It saddens me to see things like this and realize how wasteful we are. We have a major, world wide bee problem and we are throwing away thousands of gallons of honey. It's illegal for farmers in my state to use ground fall fruit; even for animal feed. When layer chickens no longer produce eggs they are killed and composted when you can pressure cook or can them and they taste great. All while there is starvation in the world.
There's my rant for the day.
A few months ago I heard about a local farm that was getting large tote tanks of reclaimed food products for animal feed. Apparently in food production a product can only go through the system once and can not be reused when recaptured no matted how sanitary the product is. I decided to check it out and arrived to find that they had at least 3000 gallons of reclaimed honey sitting in tanks among other thinks. I'm not supposed to say what company the honey comes from but I will say that it involves granola. Since the honey has clearly been heated and smelled slightly of granola I was unsure how well it would work. They gave me 10 gallons just to try.
Now that I've done some trials with it I'm pretty sure that it contains corn syrup even though they don't list it in their ingredients. I would imagine it's cheap honey from overseas. The process that I've found works well so far is as follows...
Boil the must for sanitation and to drive off the granola aroma.
Add a little baking soda to the must for alkalinity (it needs it for whatever reason)
Cool, nutrients, and pitch ec-1118
1118 has been working well in this.
back sweeten with better quality honey if needed.
Bold flavors and bochets are a great choice for this honey.
Trust me, I know the difference between quality honey meads and meads made from the garbage honey. There is defiantly a quality difference but it's been fun to practice my techniques and experiment. Plus I'm using a product which would otherwise be thrown away in massive quantities.
It saddens me to see things like this and realize how wasteful we are. We have a major, world wide bee problem and we are throwing away thousands of gallons of honey. It's illegal for farmers in my state to use ground fall fruit; even for animal feed. When layer chickens no longer produce eggs they are killed and composted when you can pressure cook or can them and they taste great. All while there is starvation in the world.
There's my rant for the day.
