We made a trip back to SoCal in August and visited one of our favorite honey vendors, Bennett's in Fillmore. I'm doing a series of varietal meads to showcase the wonderful honeys we got from these fabulous folks. This is a West Coast buckwheat honey, which has vastly less barnyard aromas than its East Coast equivalents. I also picked up a bottle of an East Coast buckwheat honey in Denver a few weeks later, which went into Batch 145: Mr. Hyde.

Ingredients in this batch

  • 2.45 lbs Bennett's buckwheat honey
  • 1 tsp yeast nutrient
  • ½ tsp yeast energizer
  • ⅓ batch Lalvin 1122 yeast, rehydrated

Process

Mixed this up on 8/21 with an SG of 1.092. I bottled both buckwheat batches on 3/27/19 and named them after tasting them side by side. As you might guess, the West Coast version came out a good deal more palatable. It's still funky and weird, as buckwheat honey should be. The East Coast version is pure, unadulterated horse blanket, and I'm really being kind here. I expect to let that one sit for a good long while, and I suspect both of these are meads only their maker could love.