Mead v.2!

[Fusorfodder]

Alrighty, so now that I've got my first mead under my belt with grocery grade honey, I'd like to move on to my next batch. I picked up 18 pounds of raw almond honey and plan to be more diligent for this batch than my last one. Does anyone have any recipes based around almond honey? I'm debating about flavoring or just going at it as a show mead. My preference is sweet over dry, but if someone has experience where that didn't turn out well for almond I'd love the heads up.

 

[bubbachunk]

Well with that much honey and D-47 you could make a sweet to semi sweet show mead for a 5 gallon batch.

 

[fatbloke]

Well, me, I'd be planning on making it a 5 gallon batch, but split it into 5 x 1 gallon batches and pitch different yeasts. I'd be getting the yeasts from morewine as they stock the "usual suspects" from Lalvin, plus it seems that they also repackage some of the other Lalvin yeasts that are normally only available in 500gramme packs. Like D21 (a "Maury" yeast and as close as you're likely to get to "Brother Adams" original yeast - and it seems that he then moved over to using the same strain as K1-V1116 when the Maury became unavailable), or D254, D80, DV10 etc etc.

Obviously, it's up to you but I've read favourable mentions of those at Gotmead.

p.s. and yes, at about 3.5 lb per gallon, you'd get some that are medium and some that are dry etc. If you could track down a bit more of the honey, you can then backsweeten with it if you're not so keen on the dry meads...

 

[gratus fermentatio]

I've never tasted almond honey, but I'd make at least a gallon of med. show mead as a flavour baseline. Regards, GF.

 

[jezter6]

I'd split it into 2 smaller batches. One to go very dry, and another that hopefully (using a sweet mead yeast or something not so tolerant) stays a little sweet.

Once they're done primary, I'd split them out into probably 4 batches so that there'd be a dry traditional, semi-sweet traditional, then I'd do something with the other 2 that might be complimentary. I think raspberry and cherry would go well with anything that has (if it does have) a little 'hint' of that almond character.

If you don't taste any almond in the honey - then just go nuts and do whatever you want, but at least make 1g of straight traditional just to see what the end result is like.

 

[KenSchramm]

I'm curious to know where you came up with almond honey? There are thousands (zillions) of hives brought in to California for that crop, but almond is a very early bloom, and my understanding is that virtually all of the almond nectar is consumed by the bees as they rear brood.

I've never tasted any, but my first inclination would be to dilute the honey with water 2:1 (2 parts water) and see what that does for the aromatics and flavor. Honey behaves like Scotch in that regard, and becomes much more accessible with some water. That should tell you if you want to do a traditional or add some fruit or spices. I'm known to haul of some spice jars and see what pairs up appealingly.

KDS

 

[Yan]

It's probably the same sort of deal as what gets called apple blossom honey, which isn't anywhere close to being all apple since they only bloom for a week or two in the spring. But it still gets called apple blossom honey as a marketing ploy, I guess. I imagine this is the same sort of thing.

 

[Fusorfodder]

I'm curious to know where you came up with almond honey? There are thousands (zillions) of hives brought in to California for that crop, but almond is a very early bloom, and my understanding is that virtually all of the almond nectar is consumed by the bees as they rear brood.

I've never tasted any, but my first inclination would be to dilute the honey with water 2:1 (2 parts water) and see what that does for the aromatics and flavor. Honey behaves like Scotch in that regard, and becomes much more accessible with some water. That should tell you if you want to do a traditional or add some fruit or spices. I'm known to haul of some spice jars and see what pairs up appealingly.

KDS

The people that run www.beefolks.com have a shop at the local Renn Fest. The almond and cotton honeys were the most interesting ones (I tasted a dozen hehe), and I picked up the almond there. Regardless of where it came from specifically, it certainly had a different taste than the others.