It's April, and I just brewed for the first time in 2021. Patrick recently got me into Still Game, a Scottish comedy show that boasts a colorful vocabulary. The word heehaw amuses the crap out of me every time I hear it, so there ya go.

This batch uses a Montmorency cherry juice Costco carries here in Minnesota, which is all kinds of delicious. In our ongoing campaign to use up some of the 87 pounds of honey we brought back from our last pre-pandemic road trip last February, this also has some sourwood honey from North Carolina. It's a surprisingly mild, very pleasant honey, and I don't expect to taste much of it on top of the extremely tart cherries. I used 1.5 gallons in the initial brew, which filled up the 2-gallon bucket combined with the honey.

The yeast I used in these three batches was badly expired, so lag time was a bit long, but they got started after a day or two.

Ingredients in this batch

  • 1,175 g Bateman's sourwood honey from Topton, NC
  • 17.2 oz Sleeping Bear Farms starthistle honey, added on 7/27
  • 1.5 gallons Montmorency cherry juice from Cherry Bay Orchards
  • 3/4 tsp Wyeast beer nutrient
  • 1/3 pack Cellar Science Clos wine yeast

Process

Tossed everything in a 2-gallon bucket, agitated, and pitched. SG was 1.104.

This batch fermented dry enough to lose much of its flavor, so I backsweetened on 7/27 with a little over a pound of starthistle honey, which we brought back from our road trip to Michigan this spring. Final gravity was 1.022.