Sheepshire mead/wine?

[Arpolis]

Hello everyone

My wife has been pretty disinterested in my mead ventures until today she said that I need to make sheepshire wine. I figured I could come up with a mead recipe for sheepshire. If you are not familiar with sheepshire it is an herb from the clover family. There are two kinds, one with yellow floweres and the other with purple. If you chew the whole plant you get a tangy/lemony taste. So of anyone has experiance with this herb I have a few questions first and then I will post my theoretical recipe.

One problem I see is that the leaves are the source of the Lemony tastes but that taste come from Oxalis acid. I have read that larger quantities of that is toxic but is fine in small doses.

If I try and leave the leaves alone and use the flowers alone I guess this would be similar to a dandelion mead.

Do you thing trying to use some leaves and pull some lemon flavor would be good or just use the more sweet flowers?

Here is my thought on a recipe:

2# of clover honey per gallon
Spring water to gallon
Yeast nutrients
Yeast energizer
lalvin k1-v1116 yeast

Let that ferment dry the rack onto the following.

1/2 cup per gal sheepshire leaves
2 cups per gal sheepshire flowers

What do you think?

 

[TheBrewingMedic]

is there a tea made from sheepshire? might give you more options for infusing it

 

[Arpolis]

Ok after about an hour of searching the google I found one reference to a tea. Oh and you have to use the more proper name wood sorrel, it just said "sweetened wood sorrel tea tastes like lemonade almost".

I found several soup recipes and some called for up to 1# of wood sorrel leaves.


With what I have found and see that at least a pound in a soup is not toxic. I will change the secondary ingrediants to:

5 cups per gallon sheepshire leaves
2 cups per gallon sheepshire flowers

Hopefully have a lemony mead from this.

 

[fatbloke]

Isn't oxalic acid the toxin in rhubarb leaves ?

Either way, I'd have thought you'd want to aim for 3 to 3.5 lb per gallon as it'll still likely end up dry, so with that taste and what you get from the wood sorrell, I'd also have thought you're likely to have to back sweeten as well........

 

[Arpolis]

I wanted a lower ABV in this mead. Around 9-10% or so rather than 14-15 like you may see with the more common 3-3.5# of honey. My wife rarely drinks and does not like high alcohol items. Plus this will give for less aging till it is drinkable. I would back sweeten to about a gravity of 1.015. Kind of a medium sweet mead.

 

[Arpolis]

I have been doing some searching and reading about sheepshire for a little while now and it belongs to the family of clover type plants called Oxalis. I was trying to find some place that sold the pink flowered wood sorrel rather than yellow flowered wood sorrel because my wife thinks a more pink mead would be fun. I did find some and it is on its way as 5 bulbs to cultivate my sheepshire ingrediants. Here is the interesting thing I found out. The plant Oxalis triangularis is also closely related and has a high ammount of Oxalis acid which is supposed to give it its tangy lemony taste. Here is a pic or two:

And I have been cultivating and growng these for years! I love purple shamrocks and even give them out as small gifts to friends. Finding that this is related to the sheepshire I want to make a mead of, I went out to my room of potted plants, Picked a purple leaf, cleaned it and poped it into my mouth to try the taste. If you ever grew up eating wild Mulberries then that is what this tasted like almost. Not the real ripe mulberries but the ones almost mature, redish rather than purple and are tart. I have both the yellow flower sheepshire and pink flower sheep shire on its way here so I will grow them, see how they taste & see what would be best for flavor. I think for now I will plan to try a recipe for this mead like this:

2# of clover honey per gallon
Spring water to gallon
Yeast nutrients
Yeast energizer
lalvin k1-v1116 yeast

Let that ferment dry, stabalize & then rack onto the following.

1/2 cup per gal of pink flowering sheepshire leaves
1 cup per gal of pink flowering sheepshire flowers
1/2 cup per gallon of purple shamrock leaves
Back sweetening honey to a gravity of 1.02

Do you think that is enough to get enough color out to make a purple mead?

 

[Lijowa]

I thought the thing to try would be to use the bulbs as they are considered a food source I'm aware of already. A nice starchy alternative to potato wine or mead in this case. Still you wouldnt want to use too much.