Just a little something I threw together while brewing my first real beer, batch 017. The wonderful folks at the Apiary, our local cidery and meadery in Carpinteria, make a wonderful short mead with this honey, a dark, complex beverage with sherry notes, and I've been wanting to try making something similar. In a quest to see how many avocado puns and nerd jokes we can fit in one brew's name, we're going to call batch 019 She-Hulk, the Jolly Green Miniature Giant.

Ingredients in this batch

  • 2.5 lbs of dark avocado honey from San Marcos Farms in Santa Barbara
  • ½ tsp. each of Valley Brewers yeast nutrient and yeast energizer.
  • 1 packet of Lalvin D47 white whine yeast
  • Filtered water to fill the carboy up to 1 gallon... and then some. (I added too much water and had to dump out a bit of must.)

Yield: Should be a gallon!

This is a no-heat short mead, simple as can be. Dumped the honey into the sanitized carboy, topped up with room temperature water, and aerated vigorously for 10 minutes or so. Simultaneously rehydrated a pack of D47. Once I was satisfied that the must was sufficiently aerated, I added yeast energizer, nutrient, and the yeast sludge.

Original gravity: 1.070 (really? Seems like it should be higher, but that's the reading I got.)

Observations

  • 2016-08-10T19:00:00: This mead was fermenting cheerfully by the next morning. The must is currently completely opaque, a handsome, 1970s beige. It has a lot of clarifying to do.