A new rule: I'm just not going to write up my batches while I still remember when I made them. That's a perfectly reasonable thing to do, innit?

I've been seeing sage honey meads here and there for a while and always like them, and I'd like to do more varietal meads in general. A rare trip to the farmer's market (who really wants to be out shopping before 1 on a Sunday?) yielded a 3-pound jar of fragrant sage honey from Buckhorn Canyon Ranch in pretty Fillmore, CA. I saved a pound to backsweeten the mead.

At bottling, this long-nameless mead finally earned a title. The old bearded guy from the Monty Python's Flying Circus intro's isn't much of a sage, but this one's for him.

Ingredients in this batch

  • 2 lbs Buckhorn Canyon Ranch sage honey
  • 1 ½ tsp yeast nutrient
  • ½ tsp yeast energizer
  • Distilled water to 1 gallon
  • ½ batch of Lalvin 1122 wine yeast, rehydrated in ¼ cup of 99-degree water; the other half went in Patrick's Batch 059

Process

Tossed everything in a carboy, agitated, and pitched. I adore the simplicity of meadmaking as much as its fragrant products. Starting gravity was 1.062.

Observations

  • 2017-04-17T20:00:00: This mead fermented quietly and will sit in primary for a few months before I decide what to do with it.
  • 2017-07-03T20:00:00: I wound up adding another half pound of sage blossom honey in mid-June. The mead finished at SG 1.002 for a calculated ABV of 10.5%. It's the perfect level of sweetness for my taste--Patrick thinks it should be sweeter--and one of my favorite plain meads so far. I managed to squeeze ten 12-oz bottles out of the gallon batch, too, and I look forward to seeing how this ages.