Batch 120: Plain Ginger Mead, Raspberry Ginger Mead, and Ginger Perry Cyser
I started this batch after spending a blissful and sinus-clearing evening juicing four or so pounds of fresh ginger from a local Korean market. I've been wanting more ginger mead/beer/cider/anything at all for a while now, and the big bag of 4.25-oz ginger juice bricks in our freezer should feed my obsession nicely. The Lonely Island reference came naturally; I subtitled this brew "incredibly gingery ginger mead with extra ginger" in my handwritten notes, and I'm going to make sure it lives up to that name.
Ingredients in this batch
- 12 lbs Kirkland clover honey
- Around 23 oz (2 oz + 3*4.25 + 8 oz) homemade fresh ginger juice
- 1 pack Red Star Premier Cuvée yeast, rehydrated
- 5 tsp yeast nutrient
- Denver tap water to 5 gallons
- 24 oz of Vintner's Harvest raspberry puree in batch 120B
- 28 oz of RW Knudsen's organic pear juice in batch 120C
Process
Starting gravity was 1.054 at 80F; hot day. Fermentation took off quickly. When I tasted the mead on 7/15, it was clearing nicely and tasted great, but clearly didn't have nearly enough ginger. I added a 4.25-oz brick of ginger juice (frozen and thawed) on top of the 2 oz in the original must. I added two more bricks on 7/30 and another 8 ounces of fresh juice on 9/16.
120A: Punch You in the Jeans (Ginger Mead)
I wound up splitting this batch on New Year's Day 2019. Three gallons remained a plain ginger mead, batch 120A: Punch You in the Jeans, which I bottled on 2/10 with FG at 0.996 and ABV at 7.7%. It's gingery through and through, but not as biting as I recall batch 041: Right Meow: A Ginger Mead being at least initially. That's likely just a result of longer fermentation. (And my quest to make a less strong mead with wine yeast was a success!)
120B: Proper Retort (Raspberry Ginger Mead)
The next two gallons of this ginger mead were racked onto a total of 24 oz of raspberry puree. I bottled on 2/18 with FG at 0.995, which should put the ABV around 7.1%. The raspberry flavor is super intense, but the mead is also dry enough not to seem insipid to me. And I probably should have racked one more time; there's a whole lotta raspberry goop in the bottles. Whoops.
120C: Cats outta Line (Ginger Perry Cyser)
After all this, I still had enough mead left due to all the ginger juice to throw together a pear cyser. With 28 oz of organic pear juice, it fills one of our 4-liter carboys. I let this one sit longer to give the sugars from the pear juice time to ferment out. At bottling on 3/27, FG was 0.997, putting it at approximately 7% like the others. The pear and ginger flavors were delightfully intense at bottling; I think this one's my favorite out of the three.