Coffee Mead

[MtBlancoFarms]

We have a local micro brewery that makes an outstanding coffee beer that I love. Thought I'd try a coffee mead, only time will tell.still can't figure out how to rotate pics so any advice on that would be appreciated.

 

[bernardsmith]

Hi MtBlancoFarms - and welcome. What was your recipe? How much coffee did you use and how did you prepare the coffee? It is often a real challenge to keep the coffee from becoming too bitter and indeed from overpowering the honey. Can sometimes take years for the coffee to mellow and allow the honey space to make its presence known

 

[MtBlancoFarms]

Hi benardsmith, and thanks for the welcome. New to mead making so doing different experiment's. This one is one gallon trial ��
Here's what I did

1 gallon- donut shop coffee, normal brew
3-1/2 #- honey boiled 45 minutes to taste of my liking
1 tsp- vanilla extract
1 tsp- Red Star premium rouge yeast (what I had on hand)
1 tsp- yeast nutrient

SG- 1.106 (if I'm reading right, new at this)

Figure nothing ventured nothing gained. I'm trying different things this year with purchased honey. Hopefully I can get my bees threw the winter, hone my mead making skills and use recipes next year with my honey.

 

[bernardsmith]

OK so you might find that normal brew with coffee makes the coffee too bitter when it becomes the liquor you use to dilute the honey. I prefer cold brewed coffee for my meads and I think that that may still not be exactly right. Just made a gallon batch that way and it tastes too much like coffee and not quite enough of it being a mead - if yer knows what I mean. I wonder if what might be even better - and I have yet to try this - is to take say 1 cup of coffee beans and lightly grind them and add those grains to the must.

Your reading of 1.106 seems a little low. Rule of thumb is that 1 lb of honey dissolved in water to make 1 gallon will raise the gravity of the water by 35 points (so, 1.035) and so if your total volume was 1 gallon I would expect the starting gravity to be closer to 1.122. However, if you had 1 gallon of water and added the 3.5 lbs of honey to that then your reading might be right on the mark

 

[voltron]

I have done a few coffee meads but I did not like the results, where i brewed the honey and coffee at the same time. I later did it with cold brew and this was better. Where I used an aged base mead and added cold brew concentrate to it, just following the instructions of the cold brew since different cold brew concentrates have different mixing ratios. for example if it said two part water one part coffee i replaced the water with mead. .this sort of worked but it does have a coffee taste, with the mead kick, but you need to drink it with in a month as the coffee and the mead would eventually seperate so not a good technique for aging, but good for soon to drink coffee mead.

But know that im older and lazier, I do the cheat technique, i just use a based mead pour me a glass of aged base mead, grab amoretti expresso syrup add a pump or two to taste and love the results, coffee mead on demand