The wonderful folks at CO-Brew sold me an intriguing pack of birch beer soda starter recently. I can't drink soda, of course, but I have a feeling this will make a nice mead.

Ingredients in this batch

  • 2 lbs Kirkland clover honey
  • 1 tsp yeast nutrient
  • ⅛ tsp DAP
  • ½ pack of recently expired WLP775 English cider yeast
  • 1 oz fresh ginger, peeled and julienned, added on 1/22
  • 1 oz Claymore birch beer spice mix (birch bark, sarsaparilla, and cinnamon), added on 1/22
  • Denver tap water to 1 gallon

Process

This was another low-effort, "throw everything together and go" batch. Mixed the honey and water, aerated, and added the nutrient, energizer, and yeast. SG clocked in at 1.074 at 75 F. The mead started clarifying within a couple of weeks, so on Jan 22, I added the birch soda spices along with an equal amount of fresh ginger... because ginger makes everything better, come on. A quick taste test before the spice addition revealed the mead to have a pleasant amount of sweetness and no major off flavors for a batch that's less than three weeks old. The spices shouldn't add much, if any, fermentable sugar, so hopefully the balance will stay about where it was at the start of secondary.

This batch wound up clarifying better than most of my meads; it's transparent, light gold, and gorgeous. The birch and ginger make it complex and weird, and I think it'll be perfect on summer days. Final gravity was 0.994 (yeah, it's bone dry) for an estimated ABV of 10.5%.