Chocolate mead anyone?

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Bump - Interested to see if anyone has used Cholaca in a mead recipe and how much was used.
 
well it looks like this thread has been around for about 8 years and occasionally it gets bumped back up with a newb like me, or a new question.
I've read through the entire thread, and I was particularly interested in the gentleman who offered his thoughts from the perspective of a Chocolate Maker. so I thought I'd bring it around once again, and see if anyone has any thoughts on this... Has anyone ever tried using Ibarra Mexican Chocolate bars for making hot chocolate drinks ?
It has 4 ingredients : Sugar, Cocoa Liquor, Soy Lecithin, and cinnamon flavor.

I'm just wondering if this might be an easy way to make a Chocolate Mead ?
and if so,
How would those experienced in making Chocolate Meads go about using this ?

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Couple of quick thoughts. Everything you add to a mead or wine must have a good reason. What would be the reason to add soy lecithin? My guess is that it is added in commercial products as an emulsifier and in a mead what would be the good sense of adding an emulsifier?

It's not easy to create a chocolate flavored mead or wine because the flavor of chocolate that we are all familiar with tends to involve cocoa butter and not simply cocoa and you really want to avoid adding any fats to a wine for two reasons. The first is that fats tend to coat your carboys and tubes and are a ***** to remove and the second is because fats tend to become rancid with age.

Now you can obtain a reasonably fair chocolate flavor using roasted cocoa nibs, but the flavor the nibs impart is not one I think of as perfectly desireable. I prefer to add chocolate barley malt (as in brewing). The heavily roasted malted grains provide no fermentable sugars (they are too cooked) but they do impart a very rich chocolate flavor (think- chocolate stouts). I think 2 oz per gallon of these cracked grains added to the secondary with nibs in the primary produce a delightful chocolate flavored mead. The use of cocoa powder, in my opinion, always tends to produce a drink that never clears.
One other option, which I have yet to try is to use Torani chocolate syrup. I do add this syrup to spirits to make chocolate liqueurs but that is another story.
 
Bernardsmith,
Thank you very much for the reply.
I had not thought about how the Soy Lecithin could contaminate the fermentation or racking vessel.
I will try an experiment with the Torani syrup.

I love the idea of a chocolate flavored Mead, but would also like to find a way to do it without the 1 to 2 year wait.
Right now I am new to making Mead and want to see some quick results. I'm sure that as I get more into the finer aspects of crafting this wonderful drink, my patience will develop and I'll be more willing to wait on the finer methods that are already proven.
Thank you again for your thoughts and advice.
Cheers
 
I may be a contrarian but in my opinion any wine or mead that is undrinkable for more than a year has been poorly made***. That all well-made wines improve dramatically as they age is not at all the same thing. But that change is what makes a good wine a great one, not a poor wine a barely acceptable one. If a recipe or those who make it say that you need to wait at least a year before the flavors become muted enough to enjoy then I would reject the protocol. In my opinion, a mead when made well, using good practices, can be enjoyed after even 3 months. After 6 months it might be transformed into a delicious drink and after 12 it should be incredible. But every mead (or wine) should be delightful shortly after it has cleared bright.
*** The one exception might be where you are oaking the mead or wine in barrels. Commercial wineries using barrels to oak their wines may need years to extract the flavors, but most home wine amkers add oak cubes or spirals to their wines and the surface area of the wood in contact with the wine is magnitudes greater, so the time needed to extract the same amount of flavors is considerably less (which is not to claim that there are no significant advantages to the longer process, eg micro-oxidation).
 
I make a Chocolate Cherry mead that I get raves on, but my recipe is for a 5 gallon batch. There are quite a few people who make chocolate meads around here, so I'll let someone else post a tried and true one gallon recipe.

I just wanted to warn you that chocolate meads take a long time to age. One year before you even want to think about bottling and another 6 months (closer to two years) before it hits its stride. The oils take a long time to break down and it is gawd awful bitter in the meantime. When I made my first batch it took the whole first year for me to convince my DB that it was going to be great. Fact is, I even started to doubt it. Now it is one of our favorites and I try to make at lease one batch every year so we stop running out.

Good Luck.

Rebecca
Hi Rebecca, can I get your chocolate cherry mead recipe? It sounds delicious!
 
Hi Rebecca, can I get your chocolate cherry mead recipe? It sounds delicious!
Recognizing you're a new member here, heads-up, when you hover over Rebecca's avatar (or her member's name) you can see an information pop-up telling us she hasn't been on this forum since March 2017. So... don't hold your breath for an answer.

But on her subsequent post (#7) she did tell us how she used the chocolate.
 
@AkTom....It's been 3 long years, (almost to the day) how did your 1 gallon batch from 2017 come out? Just curious if it lasted this long
 
@AkTom....It's been 3 long years, (almost to the day) how did your 1 gallon batch from 2017 come out? Just curious if it lasted this long

Funny you should ask. I still have it. I forget my process on it. It had dry cocoa... not very tasty. Took forever to clear.
 
I know I'm kicking an old thread here but does anyone have any experience using cocoa nibs instead of the powder? I am trying to find information on using NIBS and I am having the hardest time finding anything :confused::confused:
There’s a 2 part chopandbrew episode with Steve Fletty…
 
I make a Chocolate Cherry mead that I get raves on, but my recipe is for a 5 gallon batch. There are quite a few people who make chocolate meads around here, so I'll let someone else post a tried and true one gallon recipe.

I just wanted to warn you that chocolate meads take a long time to age. One year before you even want to think about bottling and another 6 months (closer to two years) before it hits its stride. The oils take a long time to break down and it is gawd awful bitter in the meantime. When I made my first batch it took the whole first year for me to convince my DB that it was going to be great. Fact is, I even started to doubt it. Now it is one of our favorites and I try to make at lease one batch every year so we stop running out.

Good Luck.

Rebecca
Would you be willing to share your recipe for the 5 gallon? If not I completely understand
 
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