Really?
I am planning to give JAOM a try and have seen lots of people insist that you shouldn't change the recipe.
But surely juicing and rinding the orange has to be better than shoving all that pith in? And surely a proper yeast will be better than bread yeast?
If not, what bread yeast should I use in the UK? The recipes I've seen call for Fleismanns, but I've never seen that here. What do you use?
So, Bearmaul has pretty much hit the nail on the head. Its quite easy to make a batch of this using easily obtained ingredients from the supermarket etc.
Equally, because Joe is in the US, he's used locally available materials. While it would seem that even the smallest deviation would be voiding the warranty, yet we don't have the choice here do we (did you put a base location on your profile ? ).
The first batch I made was, or so I thought, as close to benchmark. I was wrong. It came out fine but I'd used tescos own basic bread yeast and even worse, I hadn't allowed for the difference between US and Imperial gallons. So I ended up making 20% or so more but less sweet.
I've done it with tescos and co-op own brand yeast as well as allinsons.
Ive used wine yeast, I've used more cloves, etc etc.....
If the batch goes dry (as with wine yeast regularly), then the flavour is focused on the pith bitterness which would routinely be balanced by the residual sweetness in a batch made with bread yeast.
Now there's still some experimentation to be done and some has been. For instance, a JAO made normally but in an erhlenmeyer flask and on a stir plate found that it was possible for it to go dry etc etc.
I've done batches with different fruit. Lemon came out ok but lime wasn't good. Tangerine wasn't bitter enough as it came out very sweet.
So for as close to benchmark, you can get the correct honey but theres no reason why value brand shouldn't be fine. Branded or supermarket "normal" bread yeast and made up to 1 US gallon. The rest as per.....