What type of wine/brew would you classify this as?

[The Experimenter]

Introduction:
Hi! I'm the Experimenter and I'm new here (just created my account like 1 hour ago). I am also new to brewing and have been doing it for 3 months (as of today). I got into it mostly because I thought it would be fun (and it is!!) and to share what I make with family and friends.

I call myself the Experimenter because I love to just try random things; if it's on store shelves, has fermentable sugars, and doesn't have preservatives, I've thought about throwing yeast into it, just to see what happens! I don't really follow recipes; however, I do take meticulous notes on all brews so I can retry it and tweak it if it turns out good the first time... which basically everything I've tried has (except for one). I mostly try random things without much equipment, ingredients, or chemicals. I do use diammonium phosphate (nutrient) and all the basic equipment (bungs, airlocks, hydrometer, siphon, etc.), but that's it, no fining agents, or clearing agents, or metabisulfite, or any of that... not because I'm huge into natural approaches or anything like that, but just because I'm lazy. In addition to laziness, I'm also very impatient. Because of my laziness and impatience, the holy grail for me in homebrewing is finding a wine, mead, or cider recipe I love that ferments quickly (a week or two) without too many ingredients, pieces of equipment, or crazy chemicals and then only needs a couple weeks to a month (maybe 2 or 3 at most) to taste great. I cannot wait years for aging and even if I did I'd be so frustrated by the idea of finding a good recipe more than a year after starting something and then being like, "Darn, I shoulda done more than a gallon of that!" and knowing if I want more I gotta replicate it and wait more than a year again.

Anyway, enough about me and my techniques and my interests... let's get to the question I referenced in the title:
For my first ever HomeBrewTalk Forum post, I wanted to tell you about (and ask you a question about) an interesting brew I made and what you would call it or classify it as. Early in my homebrewing experience, while making my first ever cider (which used regular Mott's Apple Juice, which I was surprised to find doesn't use preservatives and tastes awesome when brewed with a beer or cider yeast), something in the grocery store juice aisle caught my eye... Mott's Apple White Grape Juice! I immediately grabbed a bunch of the 64oz bottles. I didn't know what this would create, but I figured it would taste like some sort of delicious cider/white wine blend. Before leaving the store I grabbed some strained (not filtered) clover honey... Just because I am the Experimenter and that's what I do! I put it all together (~1 gallon of the juice with 3/4 pound of the honey) in a 1 gallon fermenter with K1V. OG was 1.072 and after only 5 days it was 0.998. I checked it again 2 days later and it was the same and I racked it. After 7 days in secondary it had cleared significantly and I bottled (since it had run dry, I back sweetened with 14.5-15g of erythritol per 1 liter bottle which made it semi-sweet). The erythritol did leave a slightly cooling sensation as erythritol and xylitol are sometimes known to do, but that did age out. The longest my family let it age though was a month... because we couldn't help ourselves!! It was amazing. After only 2-3 weeks the cooling sensation had aged out and the flavor was amazing and smooth!! Everyone in my family loved it and told me I needed to get to work on my next batch right away (they even told me they'd pay for the ingredients because they knew they were going to wind up drinking all of it haha). So, I started two 2-gallon batches with the same juice and same proportion of honey, 3/4 pound per gallon (or 1.5lbs per 2-gallon batch), this time experimenting with different yeasts; one was Red Star Cuvee and the other was Red Star Premier Blanc. I also added about 3-1/2 cups of white sugar per gallon to raise the gravity in hope of achieving an actual wine-like ABV around 12-13% (since both batches were the exact same recipe except for the yeasts, both had an OG of 1.104). After about 2.5 weeks the Cuvee hit 0.996 and stopped (~14%) and the Blanc hit 1.020 (~11%) and stopped. The Cuvee was WAY TOO dry and tart, but had a lot of apple flavor. The Blanc was too sweet and not appley enough. As such, after both spent some time in secondary alone, I made a 50/50 blend of the two at bottling time which came out GREAT (and also gave me the ABV I was looking for right around 12.5%).

Long story short, while I love this brew, I don't know what to call it. Someone once told me that defining what a brew is depends on which ingredient contributes the most fermentable sugars by weight (which makes sense, if you have a gallon of apple juice with ~1lb of natural sugars in it and you add one cup of white sugar, it doesn't become a sugar wine, it's still a cider). I don't know if this is the universal rule everyone uses, but make sense to me. As such I'd like to define how much of each sugars this recipe includes (I didn't spend time trying to do exact calculations, but these are my best guesses after a few minutes with a calculator):

• 3/4 lbs of honey per gallon. Originally, I thought this might be classified as a Mead since 3/4 lbs is around 350 grams... but then I realized honey has around 80% sugar by weight on average, which gives us around 270g of sugar from the honey. So it's not a mead... or is it? I don't know.
• 3-1/2 cups of white sugar per two gallon batch (or 1.75 cups per gallon). At around 200g per cup, this gives us 350g of sugars from the white sugar. This is more than I originally planned on adding. I had planned for 2 cups, but I must have done my math wrong because that didn't get me to the gravity I wanted so I kept adding sugar (my family told me they liked the previous proportion of honey and not to add anymore in the second 2 batches).
• Mott's Apple White Grape juice (around 480g of sugar, or about 1 lbs 1 oz, per gallon)... the problem is, I don't know what proportion this juice is mixed in. Is it mixed 50% by volume of Apple Juice and 50% by volume of White Grape Juice? If so, there's slightly more Grape sugars involved since grapes naturally have more sugar than apples. Or is slightly more apple juice than grape juice such that each type of juice in the blend contributes about 50% of the sugars (~240g apple sugars and ~240g grape sugars)? I honestly don't know the answer here and I'm sure the Mott's Apple White Grape blend is a proprietary secret, a suspicion I think was confirmed by the fact that I could not find anywhere online what the proportions of the mix are... of course, all of this would be solved by just making my own blend of these two types of juices (buying apple juice and white grape juice and blending them myself... then I would know for certain which sugar is most abundant), but I can't find any White Grape Juices in my grocery store that don't have potassium sorbate.

As I said early, I love to share my brews... but whenever I offer this to someone, I always get asked what it is and I am flat out stumped every time and I simply tell them, "It's good, that's what it is" and dodge the question. All these things considered, what would you call this? A White Wine with apple and honey notes? An Apple Wine with grape and honey accents? A Sugar Wine/Kilju with grape, apple, and honey added in? A Mead with apple and grape flavors (which then opens us up to naming possibilities like Melomel, Cyser, or Pyment... and in the future I plan on trying this with bocheted honey and possibly an oak spiral in secondary, which if it is a mead opens up additional nomenclature with the terms "Bochet" and/or "Bochetomel" as well as the addition of the adjective "Oaked" onto the name)?....

What the heck is this stuff? What did I create!? What would YOU call this?

P.S. - Sorry for the really long post, but I wanted to include all necessary details you might need to answer my question (I also wanted to include the recipe specifics in case anyone wanted to try it for themselves).

 

[bernardsmith]

Hi The Experimenter - and welcome. Not sure if your "creation" has a recognized name. A blend of honey and apple is called a cyser while a blend of grape and honey is known as a pyment. Both drinks have long histories, though few mead makers would add sugar to their mead simply because all sugar does is increase the ABV without increasing the flavor and with cyser or pyment the honey flavors (and the grape wine and cider).

 

[The Experimenter]

Hi The Experimenter - and welcome. Not sure if your "creation" has a recognized name. A blend of honey and apple is called a cyser while a blend of grape and honey is known as a pyment. Both drinks have long histories, though few mead makers would add sugar to their mead simply because all sugar does is increase the ABV without increasing the flavor and with cyser or pyment the honey flavors (and the grape wine and cider).

Thanks for the reply Bernard... you didn't really answer my question though. What would you call this?... I mean I get what you're saying about how there wouldn't be "a recognized name" for this, but what would you call it? If you had to categorize it, how would you do so? If a company were selling this, what type of alcohol would it be labeled and advertised as? If I handed you a bottle of this and lead you to a cellar with nearly infinite shelves (with a shelf spot for every single one of all the different kinds of wines, meads, and ciders that are possible), which shelf would you put it on?

Additionally, in response to your comment about the added sugars not adding to the flavor... that was the point. As I said in my original post, my family told me they liked the proportion of honey in the first batch and not to add any more or less in the second batch. As such, I was looking to achieve an ABV similar to the average wine while maintaining a flavor similar to what we got from the first batch (and that was mostly successful; Batch #2 came out tasting very similar to the first batch I did of this, but with 12.5% alcohol and a little residual sweetness). Considering that I explained in my original post why I was doing this and that it came out almost exactly the way I wanted, I'm not really sure why you're pointing out to me that "few mead makers" would do this... I don't care. I'm not a mead maker. I'm the Experimenter and I like to experiment (mostly with ciders so far... and whatever you would call this recipe). I hope this isn't a hobby where some people are elitists about it and are gonna tell me I'm wrong for trying this or that just because it's not their preferred method.

NOTE: I'm not saying you're that kind of elitist type of person. Seriously, I appreciate you giving me my first reply (and started that reply by welcoming me ) and appreciate the fact that you read my overly long post that probably coulda been shorter... I was just confused about why you were telling me that real mead makers wouldn't do that in response to a post about naming conventions in which I pointed out that the recipe already came out the way I wanted it to and was enjoyed by me and the people I shared it with. Who cares what most mead makers would do if the brew was already a tasty success?

 

[bernardsmith]

We-ell actually, your not an "experimenter" (if you check out what that means in the hard sciences - you would have to be doing multiple tests using multiple ingredients while changing ONE variable each time but that you say you are not doing. OK . so there is no "experiment" you are in fact engaged in. You are making a mead. So you are a mead maker. What would I call your mead? Charlie or Bob... or perhaps Mimi..I don't know. Jimmy? it's a mead. And if you were submitting this to competition it would be called a melomel (honey and fruit). But if you said there was apple and grape ... the judges would want to be able to taste both the apple and the grapes

 

[The Experimenter]

We-ell actually, your not an "experimenter" (if you check out what that means in the hard sciences - you would have to be doing multiple tests using multiple ingredients while changing ONE variable each time but that you say you are not doing. OK . so there is no "experiment" you are in fact engaged in. You are making a mead. So you are a mead maker. What would I call your mead? Charlie or Bob... or perhaps Mimi..I don't know. Jimmy? it's a mead. And if you were submitting this to competition it would be called a melomel (honey and fruit). But if you said there was apple and grape ... the judges would want to be able to taste both the apple and the grapes

Sorry if I offended you. I don't understand why you keep coming at me with these attacks, telling me what real mead makers do compared to what I do, telling me that I'm not an experimenter according to one specific sense of the word, sarcastically and disparagingly calling my brew by people's first names just so you can tell me "I don't know... it's a mead"... If you don't know, why'd you originally respond? If you don't like my name, my brewing style, or my responses, you don't have to reply to my thread. I don't know if this is just how things go on this forum or if all hobby brewers are hostile, but maybe I should just quit this hobby. I'm not liking the vibe. Always thought brewers would be chill and friendly.

Seriously though, I got nothing against you man. Maybe I'm taking your posts the wrong way or reading it with the wrong inflection in my mind, but I'm just trying to ask questions because I'm new. As I said in my original reply post I really do appreciate you responding and giving a reply. I was just looking for clarification. Your original post didn't clearly answer my question (it mentioned mead makers but didn't clearly say that "mead" is what you thought mine was), so I just wanted clarification. Can you explain to me how mead is defined? I mean if there are about 270g of sugars from the honey but 350g from the white sugar, why isn't it a Kilju? Is the classification of a brew not dependent on the weight of the most dominant sugars in suspension? How does one define and classify a brew when multiple types of sugar are present?

Also, I am an experimenter. Yes, you can define it in a strict scientific sense according to modern scientific methods with close attention to specific variables (by the way, I did say I tried the exact recipe 3 times, each time only changing the yeast, so not sure why you said I said I didn't do that), OR you can use the word colloquially to mean someone who tries new and different things just to see what happens. I'm not a scientist, but I am an experimenter... language, especially English, is complex; One word can mean more than one thing.

 

[bernardsmith]

I think you may be reading my post in a way that it is not written. sorry that it makes you feel insulted or challenged. It's called Scottish humor..

 

[The Experimenter]

I think you may be reading my post in a way that it is not written. sorry that it makes you feel insulted or challenged. It's called Scottish humor..

Good, I'm glad I was reading it wrong. In my head I was hearing an annoyed spiteful tone, especially when you were sarcastically suggesting calling it "Charlie or Bob" and then went out of your way to clarify I wasn't an experimenter for no reason. I'm glad I just misunderstood...

You say my concoction is a Mead (and that I'm a mead maker, which excites the nordic/viking blood in my veins). Here I was thinking it was some sort of Apple Wine or Cider and it turns out it's a mead... Can you explain to me how mead is defined? I mean if there are about 270g of sugars from the honey but 350g from the white sugar, why isn't it a Kilju? Is the classification of a brew not dependent on the weight of the most dominant sugars in suspension? How does one define and classify a brew when multiple types of sugar are present?

 

[bernardsmith]

Technically - ie legally, if you are a commercial mead maker I believe that 50% of the fermentable sugars must come from honey. If the majority of the sugars are coming from fruit or some other sugar source then it may not be labelled a "mead". But you are not making alcohol whose label must be approved by the federal govt.
Kilju.. (is that a real name or is that a corruption of "kill you"?) "Sugar based wine" is prison hooch. The taste is the taste of ethanol. Wines are made from the flavors that come from fruit or flowers or honey, so your mead or wine is not kilju. Too much flavor from the fruit and the honey to taste only of ethanol.

 

[The Experimenter]

Technically - ie legally, if you are a commercial mead maker I believe that 50% of the fermentable sugars must come from honey. If the majority of the sugars are coming from fruit or some other sugar source then it may not be labelled a "mead". But you are not making alcohol whose label must be approved by the federal govt.
Kilju.. (is that a real name or is that a corruption of "kill you"?) "Sugar based wine" is prison hooch. The taste is the taste of ethanol. Wines are made from the flavors that come from fruit or flowers or honey, so your mead or wine is not kilju. Too much flavor from the fruit and the honey to taste only of ethanol.

I understand I'm not being labeled by any government regulations or any of that... My main concern is I want to know what to call it when friends ask what type of drink I just gave them. I could come up with my own name for the brew, but I still want to try to define what type it is.

Interesting, so even though white sugar is probably the dominant sugar by weight, the presence of the honey, apple, and grape prevents it from being a Sugar Wine (in which case the honey sugars are probably the second most dominant, even though they constitute less than 50% of the total sugars)... so I guess it's a mead (at least more so than it would be a traditional White Wine and/or Apple Wine).

I think Kilju is a real name. I've always heard it pronounced "kill you", but spelt Kilju (I believe that is the Finnish term for sugar wine... I don't know why people use the Finnish word for it, I doubt they were the first people to discover the fermenting of unflavored sugar water. My guess is someone probably spelled it that way in a movie once and it caught on).

 

[Maylar]

My main concern is I want to know what to call it when friends ask what type of drink I just gave them. I could come up with my own name for the brew, but I still want to try to define what type it is.

This really is a good question, since there are definitions for mead with grapes (pyment) and mead with apples (cyser). But there's no official title for mead with both. I think I would call it a melomel, which is mead with fruit - that covers pretty much anything. But as already noted, mead means that at least half the fermentable sugars come from the honey. Short of that, it's simply a wine. So, "honey, grape and apple" wine would be appropriate.

 

[The Experimenter]

This really is a good question, since there are definitions for mead with grapes (pyment) and mead with apples (cyser). But there's no official title for mead with both. I think I would call it a melomel, which is mead with fruit - that covers pretty much anything. But as already noted, mead means that at least half the fermentable sugars come from the honey. Short of that, it's simply a wine. So, "honey, grape and apple" wine would be appropriate.

Thanks for the comment. It is hard to define, isn't it? I guess Melomel would work for placing it into a type/category.

Since it is "honey, grape, and apple" as you said, I came up with a name for the specific brew that my family and I call it. We've been calling it "Whapploney". I got the name by making a portmanteau of White Wine (because of the white grape juice), Apple Wine, and Honey Wine.

While this name is funny and cool, I still wanted to try to define the type of brew for when I share it with people who have never tasted it before.

Thanks for the reply!!

 

[Maylar]

Just as a reference, the 2015 BJCP guide for mead has the following to say about melomels:

M2E. Melomel
The melomel subcategory is for fruit meads made with any
fruit not associated with any other fruit mead subcategory, or
with a combination of fruits from multiple fruit mead
subcategories (such as grapes and stone fruit). Some examples
include citrus fruit, dried fruits (dates, prunes, raisins, etc.),
pears, figs, pomegranates, prickly pear, bananas, pineapples,
and most other tropical fruit. If in doubt, enter the fruit here –
judges should be flexible with fruit not explicitly named in other
categories. The use of Melomel as a subcategory name does not
imply that other meads in the Fruit Mead category are not also
melomels; the choice was made to avoid using the same word
twice in different contexts. The culinary, not botanical,
definition of fruit is used here. If you have to justify a fruit using
the word “technically” as part of the description, then that’s not
what we mean.
Overall Impression: In well-made examples of the style, the
fruit is both distinctive and well-incorporated into the honeysweet-
acid-tannin-alcohol balance of the mead. Different types of
fruit can result in widely different characteristics; allow for a
variation in the final product.

 

[The Experimenter]

Just as a reference, the 2015 BJCP guide for mead has the following to say about melomels:

Interesting, so since I have a brew in which honey is one of the most dominant sugars (if not the most dominant), then it is safe to say it is a mead, but also safe to call it a melomel due to the fact that it is mixed with more than 1 type of fruit.

Awesome!! Thank you for the reference to a legit guide like that. I didn't know that existed.

Thank You!!

 

[razerivaldi]

Hi there! I can't exactly help you out on this topic as I'm quite new to brewing as well and am not really familliar with different types of brews, but I can see you have the passion and I too am looking to converse with people who share the same passion, do let me know if you wish to have a chat!