Denver has its own yeast lab, and it's amazing. Our favorite homebrew store sold us a monthly yeast subscription this year, so we now have a few Inland Island yeasts kicking around to try. Inland Island boasts the highest cell counts in the industry, and the few beers we've made with their yeasts were fast and furious fermenters. Time to get back into tea meads! I went with my favorite widely available honey, Trader Joe's mesquite.

Ingredients in this batch

Process

I briefly boiled the water, then cooled it to about 170 and steeped the teabags for 10 minutes or so. Once the tea was cool enough to handle, I measured out the honey (more of it than intended, because I was multitasking), mixed with the tea, and let it cool fully. Starting gravity came in at 1.082. Patrick pitched the yeast for me later that night, and true to Inland Island form, the mead was bubbling along merrily by the next afternoon.

This batch took an incredibly long time to clarify, but things finally cleared up after 3+ months. I bottled batch 114 on 10/13 with a final gravity of 0.994 (11.5% ABV). It proved to be a really interesting batch because the aroma kept changing every time we opened a bottle. The initial Lady Grey aroma faded during fermentation, but it's been reading very different each time. In mid-November, we brought a bottle to a local meadmakers' meeting, and everyone was firmly convinced that there must be lavender in the batch. I definitely want to try another batch with a different yeast sometime, as well as doing more with INIS-572... when I have infinite time to wait for the batch to clear, that is.