Critique my recipe: Persimmon Melomel

[dougdecinces]

I have 9 lbs of persimmons a coworker gave me that have been taking up space in my freezer. I want to try to clean out my chest freezer to make way for everything I plan on growing/harvesting/freezing this year. Naturally my thoughts turned to a mead. I wanted to know what everyone thought of this:

There is a meadery in town here that makes low-ish gravity sparkling meads which me and SWMBO both like, so I planned on making a base of 3 lbs of persimmons and 1.25 lbs of honey/gallon. This would give me an OG of around 1.065. I would let it ferment down and then backsweeten with honey to a semi-sweet stage. This would put me at about 9% ABV. Besides wanting to know if that sounds delicioius or not, I want to know what kinds of honey would pair well with persimmons and also if you think the persimmons could use some added spices. I was thinking a split and scraped vanilla bean might be interesting.

 

[Tyrone]

I think this sounds phenomenal. Good luck.

Don't ditch the vanilla bean!

 

[Goblet]

That sounds really good. For a vanilla bean, just splitting & scraping and adding it straight to the mead should work fine. You can always add more/other spices later by putting some spice into an small spice jar with a lid and adding vodka. Just let the flavors infuse into the vodka for a few weeks. You can test the amount of spice flavor you want to add by putting a few drops of the (strained) spice infused vodka into a glass of mead. After finding the amount you want, scale that amount to the whole batch. It's not usually much -- about a teaspoon per gallon gives a nice spice flavor without overpowering the fruit (depending on how strong your spice infusion is). This can even be done right before bottling.

 

[Goblet]

My favorite honey for mead is Tupelo, by a lot. It has a spiciness that would be really good with persimmons.

 

[Tyrone]

My favorite honey for mead is Tupelo, by a lot. It has a spiciness that would be really good with persimmons.

I've got two gallons of tupelo honey/pineapple/coconut melomel (Pinacoladamel?) going.


It's a really nice honey...