Trying a one-gallon batch in a new one-gallon carboy. Xenia and I went honey and equipment shopping yesterday; she’s making batch 002 at about the same time. This recipe gives me a chance to try out a new yeast and new varietal (and source) of honey. And I’m trying a no-heat brew based on the instructions in Schramm’s Compleat Meadmaker, p. 43. I’m still pondering what to do with this after primary fermentation. It may wind up turning into a blueberry melomel. Or a metheglin of some sort. (Sage, maybe? We’ll see.)

We’ve got some new equipment: turns out the two 1-gallon carboys we got from Amazon could have been purchased a bit cheaper at a local homebrew store, though having fermentation airlock and stopper included was convenient, and so was having it delivered directly to my home. We also stopped at the homebrew store attached to Ventura’s Surf Brewery (which also makes very tasty beer); it’s a small store but more in our general orbit than the excellent Valley Brewers, and they sold us several new wine yeast strains. The lady behind the counter was polite and helpful, and texted her boss to get an answer to a question she didn’t know (and she knew a lot). We picked up a set of handles for the five-gallon carboy, too.

I'm going to call this recipe Blueberry-Honey Metheglyn Sage Sgt. Pepper, due to the flavors involved.

Ingredients in this batch

Yield: approximately 3 liters.

Annoyance: Bennett's only sells their blueberry varietal in twelve-ounce bear-shaped bottles, so I used five and rinsed them with warm water to get out as much honey as possible. (They do sell other varietals in larger containers; we also came home with 3-pound containers of two other varietals that we're looking forward to playing with soon. Come on, Bennett's: if you're going to package the honey in a twelve-ounce bottle, it should at least be a sturdier bottle than these flimsy ones that it currently comes in.)

Emptied as much of the honey as possible from five bottles directly into a large funnel sitting atop the sterilized new carboy; heated some water, poured it in, and shook it up to get the rest out. This resulted in audible cracking sounds from the cheap plastic jars, but got (virtually) all the honey out. Rinsed a little more hot water over the funnel used to collect the honey, in order to rinse the honey in, then poured in filtered tap water to bring the contents up to about ⅔ gallon. Poured in the yeast nutrient and yeast energizer, then put a lid on the carboy and shook vigorously for four minutes, occasionally righting the carboy and opening the cap to make sure there was oxygen exchange. If that needs to happen. Then I filled the carboy up to the one-gallon mark and agitated it for another two minutes and took the temperature. Still almost ninety degrees: too hot for the yeast. Made room in the fridge and put the carboy in there for about an hour, until it came down to 78°F.

Meanwhile, put the yeast in ¼ cup of water at 103°F and let it sit for an hour while the must cooled, which I once again assumed would happen more quickly (though this was admittedly much better than the wait time with batch 001). I pulled out approximately ½ cup of must into the reading tube for the hydrometer and continued to refrigerate it until it reached 60°F. At this point, the yeast was suspended in its water and showed some signs of activity, but had not noticeably increased in volume. I pitched it into the carboy through a small funnel, put the screw-top lid onto the carboy neck, and once again agitated the entire carboy for four minutes. At this point, as with all of the previous agitations, the must looked vigorously aerated, with a lot of small bubbles piled high on the top of it. I put the fermentation lock on the carboy and filled it to the fill line with vodka, then labeled it Batch 003.

When the sample must finally came down to 60°, the specific gravity reading was precisely 1.140, which I have the impression is rather high. (Schramm says the gravity will decrease by about 0.100 during fermentation, and that anything with a final gravity over 1.020 is in the dessert mead range. We'll see what level it falls to. Schramm also says this yeast is nitrogen-hungry, but then, his table of characteristics says blueberry honey has a comparatively high amount of nitrogen. We'll see.) Cleaned and sanitized the equipment and went to bed; no immediate signs of fermentation.

Secondary fermentation

On 2 May, racked into a fresh, sanitized one-gallon carboy, and added a muslin bag with some spices:

I worry that that's too much, but I guess we'll see.

Took a gravity reading: 1.125. Several people more knowledgeable than I have told me there's no reason to chill the must to 60°F, and that just converting the reading based on temperature is fine. So that's what I'm doing now. The ABV calculator suggests that this change in gravity level means that the alcohol level is around 14% to 16%. Slipped the muslin bag into the new carboy, then racked the mead onto it.

Observations

Batch 003 is already starting to flocculate.
Sediment at bottom of carboy on 24 Apr 2016.
  • 2016-04-17T11:00:00: There is definitely fermentation: there's bubbling in the carboy and from the airlock. There's also krausen appearing at the top of the brew, much more than in batch 001, but much less than with the raw honey Xenia used for batch 002.
  • 2016-04-24T13:30:00: Carbon dioxide discharge from the carboy has slowed quite a bit, and there's a bunch of spent yeast at the bottom. There's also obvious clarification happening from the top down, leading up to the row of sediment at the bottom. I'm no expert, but it certainly seems to be going well.
  • 2016-05-02T18:00:00: Fermentation basically having stopped, racked into a new sterlized carboy, adding spices as described in secondary fermentation, above.
  • 2016-05-16T00:48:00: There are no visible signs of fermentation in the carboy, and disturbing it no longer seems to shake out dissolved carbon dioxide. It's nowhere near as clear as batch 002 is at this point, though. Still, it may be ready to be racked again next weekend, or perhaps even for bottling.
  • 2016-05-16T00:48:00: Racked again to a new sanitized carboy, removing the muslin bag with spices. There are still no visible signs of fermentation in the carboy. It's still not clear, but it's clearer.
  • 2016-05-30T20:35:00: Bottled in 500mL EZ Cap bottles. Final gravity is 1.020, which makes the ABV about 15%.

Tasting notes

2016-05-30_22_11_47_HDR
Batch 003 during bottling on 30 May 2016; it's the glass on the right.
  • 2016-05-03T01:51:00 (during racking to secondary fermentation): Still very sweet, but obviously strong, too. Clearly it's a dessert mead; let's see how it does when turned into metheglin. Our small sample clarified substantially in the glass, too, suggesting (I hope) that the rest of the clarification will happen quickly.
  • 2016-05-22T21:05:00 (during racking to tertiary fermentation): Still very sweet, but the spice profile is rather pronounced. The sage predominates and gives it a wild, grassy flavor: there's more complexity than I would have expected from just sage. Part of that is the pink peppercorns, which have a bit of a gentle bite at the back end. My current impression—and we'll see how this works as the mead ages—is that I wish I'd had a bit less sage and a bit more pepper, or ground pepper instead of whole peppercorns. But, again, we'll see how it ages. It's still clearly quite sweet, but tastes a bit less sweet and is less prominently flavored like rocket fuel.
  • 2016-05-30T20:45:00 (during bottling): Still quite sagey—still maybe just a little too much—and still deliciously sweet. It think that it could use a bit more pepper on the back end: maybe next time using ground peppercorns, or a larger volume. The pepper seems to be dropping out rather quickly.
  • 2016-07-04T18:00:00 (during holiday barbecue): quite popular. The peppercorns are barely perceptible at all any more (note: next time, try cracking them, or using ground pepper), but the sage is quite forward and goes well with this quite sweet mead. The mead has entirely clarified, too.

Lessons Learned

  • Pulling out a half-cup of must, or about ⅔ of the volume of the hydrometer tube, is more than enough to measure any reading on the hydrometer that's within its range of measurement.
  • Heating the water less would have been just as effective a way to extract honey but might have been easier on the cheap plastic bottles and/or the honey; and it would have meant less cooling time before pitching the yeast.
  • Waiting for the temperature of the must to fall from 68°F to 60°F takes a really long time. Get a hydrometer calibrated for 68°F instead of 60°F.

Next Time

I feel like this was basically quite successful, and it wound up rather popular, but I want the next batch to be:

  • Less sweet (perhaps by using less honey, perhaps by not using blueberry varietal honey)
  • Less sagey (perhaps ½ to ⅔ the amount)
  • More pepper-forward (probably by cracking the peppercorns and/or using more of them)