I'm still catching up on writeups, but I'm trying! I'm trying!

As much as I don't actually drink tea in real life, tea-based meads are becoming my thing. This one combines gunpowder green tea with deep amber avocado honey from Bennett's Honey Farm. This was brewed concurrently with batch 056, an elderberry mead that also uses avocado honey. We named this mead for a character in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Ingredients in this batch

  • 1.25 oz loose-leaf Twinings gunpowder green tea
  • 2 lbs Bennett's avocado honey
  • 1 ½ tsp yeast nutrient
  • ½ tsp yeast energizer
  • Distilled water to 1 gallon
  • ½ batch of Lalvin 1116 wine yeast, rehydrated in ¼ cup of 104-degree water

Process

I bagged the green tea in a brewing sock and steeped it for 20 minutes in 0.6 gallons distilled water, which had been boiled and cooled to 176 F. I let the tea cool to 100 or so, then added it to the clean carboy on top of the honey, nutrient, and energizer. (This helped massively with getting the honey mixed into the must quickly. Batch 056 didn't do so well.) I added distilled water to 1 gallon, finished aerating, and pitched yeast. Starting gravity was 1.079.

Observations

  • 2017-03-12T12:00:00: When I got up the morning after pitching the yeast, I found that this mead had bubbled over into the airlock... and all over the shelf it was sitting on. I cleaned up and removed a bit of must, which tasted like very sweet, carbonated green tea and was far more delicious than it had any right to be. A couple of hours later, the mead was back in the airlock, but pouring out another ½ cup or so did the trick.
  • 2017-03-24T16:00:00: This mead is clarifying beautifully. Can't wait to try it.
  • 2017-06-05T16:00:00: Batch 055 finished at a final gravity of 1.011 for a calculated ABV of 8.9%. As usual, the yield was eight 12-oz bottles.