Mixed Berry Mystical Melomel

[aiptasia]

I had to make this mead in the middle of the winter blizzards of 2014. Fresh berries were impossible to source so I used frozen. It's useful to have a nylon paint strainer bag to handle the fruit and a big large funnel makes pouring must and cold water into a carboy a breeze.

Ingredients:

12 lbs. of local honey (I used Gallberry. Tupelo or Orange Blossom preferred)
4 twelve oz. bags frozen mixed berries (blue, straw, black, rasp.)
1 sixteen oz. bag of frozen mango
2 clementine oranges
1 meyer lemon
1 tsp. yeast energizer
1 tsp. yeast nutrient
2 packets Lalvin RC-212 Bourgovin yeast (D-47 also works fine)
5.5 gallons bottled water

Equipment:

1 five gallon stock pot
1 long metal spoon
1 nylon paint strainer bag
1 large funnel
1 six gallon carboy (I used a plastic better bottle)
1 #10 bung
1 airlock
1 tablespoon sanitizer for airlock
1 food thermometer
1 sanitized small soup pot (for pouring)
Sanitizer (star san, iodophor, whatever you use)
Frozen fruit crusher (I used a food processor, but a blender might work)
A solo cup


Process:

Slice and quarter clementines and meyer lemon and de-seed. Freeze all of the fruit to help sanitize fruit and burst fruit cell walls. Clean and sanitize your brewing equipment with sanitizer. Place 2.5 gallons of bottled water into the stock pot and heat to 180 degrees and hold at that temperature. Place frozen fruits into food processor and chop to bits.

Add 16 oz. of room temperature bottled water to a sanitized cup (I used a solo cup) and re-hydrate both packets of yeast per instructions.

Remove stock pot from heat and add honey. Pour some warm water from the stock pot into the honey container to dissolve remaining honey and pour into stock pot. Stir with long spoon into must. Return to heat and warm&hold must at 180 degrees. Add chopped fruit to paint strainer bag. Insert strainer bag into the stock pot. Swirl and dunk repeatedly. Warm/hold temperature of must at 170f for ten minutes. Steep fruit and skim off any film with spoon.

After ten minutes, remove strainer bag of fruit and allow to drain, then remove completely from must. Stir the must well. Add yeast energizer & yeast nutrient and stir again. Turn off heat. Insert funnel into the neck of your carboy and pour remaining 2.5 gallons of water into carboy. Use the sanitized soup pot as a ladle and ladle the must from your stock pot into your carboy using the funnel. Pour carefully as spilling the must is a sticky mess. Keep ladling until you can pick up and pour the remainder of the must from the stock pot directly into the funnel.

Sanitize the thermometer and check must temperature. Pitch yeast into the must when the must temperature falls below 80 degrees f.. Sanitize the bung and attach. Rock and shake the carboy by tilting it on it's bottom edge and shake it up good for five minutes to aerate. Sanitize and insert airlock. Add sanitizer to airlock. Carry carboy to a cool, dark, dry place to ferment.

*At 24 hours, added 1 white labs servomyces capsule contents + 1 min pure O2 after degassing.


After every 30 days for three months, rack to a fresh carboy to condition and clear. If the mead doesn't clear to your satisfaction, you may use super kleer or KC finings.

Target FG: 1.010

Can be back sweetened if desired.

*indicates edits.

 

[Beek]

Looking forward to the follow up. As a beekeeper by trade, I'm always looking for new mead recipes. Let us know how it turns out!

 

[aiptasia]

Will do. After doing some reading up on Ken Schramm's The Compleat Meadmaker, I decided to modify the extra nutrient additions slightly and use my pure oxygen wand for brewing to oxygenate the must just once (one really good blast of pure O2 for one minute). I had to degass the must with a few minutes of gentle stirring with the oxygen wand prior to giving it the pure oxygen because of CO2 retention in the must already forming.

Since i'd given it a fairly strong dose of both DAP based nurients and yeast energizer, I didn't want to produce any off flavors in the finished mead, so I switched up the nutrient addition to a capsule of servomyces which is merely dehydrated yeast hulls. I then oxygenated the yeast for a solid strong minute with a froth of pure oxygen from my O2 wand.

The yeast appear to be happy and are gurgling away inside the must. Our house temperatures inside are in the mid 60's which is perfect for fermenting this mead and the base of the carboy is resting on our tile floor in an off grade house. It's succeeding in holding the temperature right where I want it in the low 60's and i've draped over the carboy with a dark black t-shirt to keep the ambient light out of it. Hopefully, if our winter holds up like it's doing now, we'll be in the cold air until March. If we do have some sort of freakish warm up, I'll stick the mead into my chest freezer and finish fermenting it. Right now, my garage is wayyyy to cold to stick it out there in the chest freezer. It would freeze solid.

 

[aiptasia]

It appears to have finished fermenting. Hydrometer readings are at .995 and i've decided to hit the batch with KC finings. I've just added the ketosol and will add the chitosan this afternoon, then rack off the lees in 24-36 hours after clearing. After racking, i'll add campden tablets and potassium sorbate, then backsweeten to taste.

After it's cleared and re-racked, i'll post another photo update. I can't wait to taste it. It smells amazing. After reading a lot of mead reviews, I don't hold out much hope for the taste until it ages a bit but one can hope.

 

[aiptasia]

Ok, the Super Kleer KC finings worked like a charm for clearing this melomel. If you ever use super kleer, be sure to follow the instructions on the back of the packet. Add the kietosol (sp?) to your must and stir gently for a few seconds, then wait a minimum of one hour to 24 hours (I waited an hour) before adding the chitosan. The chitosan works best if you mix it with two tablespoons of boiling hot water before slowly adding it to your must. Again, add it slowly for about 30 seconds while gently stirring if you can.

The picture is after 48 hours of clearing right before I racked this mead onto six crushed campden tablets. I managed to grab a 12 oz. pour into a solo cup while racking onto the campden and tasted it.

Initial impressions is that it had a fantastic honey and berry aroma. It smells like a honey hive in a fruit orchard. Upon tasting it, the melomel was very dry and tart. Berries, citrus and mango tartness stung the mouth with dry alcohol and some very vinous notes from the yeast. It tasted like a very tart, very dry honey berry wine. I wasn't sure I was happy with the flavor as it was, so I took what I had left in the solo cup and put it in a coffee mug and warmed it up in the microwave for one minute. Then, I added about a tablespoon of tupelo table honey to the solo cup and back sweetened the now hot cup of melomel.

Wow, what an incredible difference that made. The flavor is just explosive. It's mango tart with wonderful berries all over the tongue. The sweetness counterbalances it perfectly. I'm truly amazed by how great it tastes now. I can't wait to back sweeten the whole batch. Just a sorbate treatment for 48 hours to make sure there's no residual fermentation and Wow!!!!

 

[IJesusChrist]

Explain the microwaving? Why?

How do you plan to improve the rest of it to match your microwaved sample?

 

[skunkboy]

Melomels always seem to be nicer with at least some residual sweetness to offset the acids/tannins from the fruit....

 

[RegarRenill]

I imagine he nuked it to warm it so that the honey dissolved more readily.

 

[aiptasia]

Explain the microwaving? Why?

Honey dissolves better into a warm liquid. Remember, this was just a sample cup of mead and it was about 65f.. A warmed up cup of mead dissolved the tablespoon of honey better. I then poured it over ice to taste it. Nothing scientific yet, this was still pre-metabisulfate & sorbate.

How do you plan to improve the rest of it to match your microwaved sample?

Simple. I'm going to take a gravity reading on a cup's worth of mead and add honey to it until it reaches the desired sweetness level I want. Then, i'll take a second gravity reading. The difference in the gravity points will tell me how much honey (approximately) to add to the whole batch of mead.

One pound of honey will add approx. 34 gravity points to one gallon of mead. In a 5 gallon batch, that's about 6 to 7 gravity points per pound of honey. So, for my mead that's fermented out to .995 FG, let's say hypothetically the magic number for the right amount of sweetness is a gravity of 1.020. That's 25 gravity points, which works out to a little over four pounds of honey to get the whole batch up to that level (25/6 = 4.16 pounds of honey).

 

[IJesusChrist]

My bad, I thought the microwave was not for dissolving the honey. I missed that part. I though you had gone under the though of
"Hmm, tastes off. I think I'll microwave it! Oh wow! Its delicious!"

Didn't see that you added the honey.

 

[aiptasia]

My bad, I thought the microwave was not for dissolving the honey. I missed that part. I though you had gone under the though of
"Hmm, tastes off. I think I'll microwave it! Oh wow! Its delicious!"

Didn't see that you added the honey.

Yep, just so the honey would blend easier with the cup of melomel.

My calculations were correct, I needed about 4 lbs. of orange blossom honey to back sweeten it. The airlock is on it now and i'll watch it for a few days for signs of fermentation. If it remains still, i'll have it bottled up by the end of the week. Woot!

 

[IJesusChrist]

My calculations were correct,

Bask in the glory of this statement

 

[aiptasia]

Bask in the glory of this statement

Ya got that right. I love it when my maths are correct and I don't screw something up.

After no signs of activity, I bottled the mead yesterday in 24 one liter swing top bottles. I have a serious amount of dessert melomel on my hands. My Wife had her first chilled glass of it last night and said, "It tastes like honey and fruit."

 

[IJesusChrist]

hahahaha, she's pretty spot on, huh?

 

[aiptasia]

hahahaha, she's pretty spot on, huh?

Dialed in. She's usually critiquing my recipes or telling me what she tastes funky in it. This melomel, she liked right away. She's partial to light sweet wines (pinot grigio and the like) so this was closer to her tastes than a lot of the concoctions I brew up.