Hibiscus/hop?

[The_Dutch]

So I’ve been playing around with new mead recipes and this is one I think I want to try..give me some feedback

Make one gallon of strong hibiscus tea
Bring to boil
Add 1/4-1/2? Oz centennial hops
Boils for one hour
3 lbs of honey
KV-1116 yeast
Yeast nutrient

Thanks guys

 

[bernardsmith]

Here are my thoughts but others may have a different take. You boil hops in wort for an hour to extract the bitterness from the plant. Beer is essentially sweet and the bitterness offsets the 15 or so points of sweetness that is left when the yeast quit fermenting. With wine, yeast quit when there are no simple sugars left and that generally means when the wine is brut dry. So, do you really want to have all that bitterness with no sweetness as a counterbalance? You might.. but you might want to highlight the flavor of the hops. That's a 10 minute boil. Or the aroma of the hops and that's a dry hop - adding the hops to your secondary for about a week to 10 days.
The other thing is that cooking any flower or leaf for 60 minutes is a little bit of overkill. Do you drink regular tea? How long do you boil the leaves for? Do you even boil the leaves? You steep the leaves in water a little below boiling for about 5-10 minutes and that extracts the desired flavors. Trying tasting black tea after you boiled it for 60 minutes. You are chewing on tannins. Hibiscus may be different (doesn't have all those tannins) ... but stewing the flowers for an hour in boiling water? Your call, of course.

 

[The_Dutch]

Here are my thoughts but others may have a different take. You boil hops in wort for an hour to extract the bitterness from the plant. Beer is essentially sweet and the bitterness offsets the 15 or so points of sweetness that is left when the yeast quit fermenting. With wine, yeast quit when there are no simple sugars left and that generally means when the wine is brut dry. So, do you really want to have all that bitterness with no sweetness as a counterbalance? You might.. but you might want to highlight the flavor of the hops. That's a 10 minute boil. Or the aroma of the hops and that's a dry hop - adding the hops to your secondary for about a week to 10 days.
The other thing is that cooking any flower or leaf for 60 minutes is a little bit of overkill. Do you drink regular tea? How long do you boil the leaves for? Do you even boil the leaves? You steep the leaves in water a little below boiling for about 5-10 minutes and that extracts the desired flavors. Trying tasting black tea after you boiled it for 60 minutes. You are chewing on tannins. Hibiscus may be different (doesn't have all those tannins) ... but stewing the flowers for an hour in boiling water? Your call, of course.

Awesome information thanks! I was thinking about dry hopping the first time around but someone suggested doing a boil..so I think I will go with that

 

[CKuhns]

Bernard is absolutely correct. I have done a lot of hibiscus tea in primary and have settled on steeping the tea (not boiling) for no more than 15 minutes. I have only done a couple of hopped and dry hopped 2 oz centenials in 5 gallons for 10 and 12 days each. Both had a light hop flavor, not at all bitter but took a year to age out some of the "grassy" flavor. At 8 months was ok but at 12 pretty darned good.

 

[laughing jack]

I am in support of dry hopping. Recently dry hopped an orange blossom mead (5gal) with 2 ounces of Citra and it has been one of my favorites. If you boil the hops, it’s going to make your mead bitter.

-J-

 

[biochemedic]

Agreeing with all of the above...you could do a combination as well...short boil with some hops to get both aroma as well as some bitterness, plus dry hopping. I've made a couple of meads like this. You can get a lot of bitterness in a 20 min boil, but it takes a lot of hops. You will probably want some residual sweetness though, as @bernardsmith mentioned. Still it doesn't take much to stabilize and backsweeten to a FG of around 1.010 and that will balance a fair amount of IBUs.