We picked up some dark California wildflower honey on a trip out to the coast a month and a half ago, and it's been sitting, waiting for us to move so that we could start brewing our way back down through our honey stash again. This particular batch of wildflower honey was purchased at Charlie Brown Farms in the desert town of Littlerock. (Yes, Littlerock, because it's a town full of desert rednecks, as far as I can tell.) Charlie Brown Farms is one of those overpriced highway tourist trap where rednecks can buy a variety of shitty products that reinforce their smug belief that they're superior human beings: cheap tin signs that say smug things about Jesus; nutcrackers in the likeness of Hillary Clinton (get it? get it? see why it's so funny? see what comedy geniuses these rednecks are? see how much better for democracy their cowardly slurs and insults are than discussing issues and ideas?); cans of snacks that have clever, arguably misleading names (like Whoop-Ass, because it's in a can—see? see?); probably-unlicensed products displaying cheap, badly-done reproductions of famous characters allowing the artists who made, say, the Captain America cookie jar to profit off of someone else's good idea; that kind of thing. They also had some local honey, which was in fact pretty tasty: dark and sweet and rich. So a not-quite-three-pound jar labeled three pounds is getting made into a one-gallon batch, which I'm calling Pry Open Your Words—a not-particularly-clever joke that ties the batch name to an obscure 90s pop song related to the name of the store.

Ingredients in this batch

  • 2.83 lb California wildflower honey from Charlie Brown Farms.
  • 1 tsp. Fermax yeast nutrient.
    • Note: No SNA planned for this batch.
  • untreated tap water to just over 1 gallon.
  • ½ packet Lalvin 71B-1122 wine yeast, rehydrated in ½ cup untreated tap water at 95℉, and split with batch 149.
  • 10 Idaho City Wild Huckleberry tea bags from the Idaho City Trading Post in Idaho City, Idaho.

Procedure

Poured honey into the carboy through a funnel, then added yeast nutrient and water. Agitated, added more water to just over a gallon; agitated. Agitated obsessively and repeatedly and intermittently for over an hour, then measured the gravity and pitched the rehydrated yeast.

Brew date: 11 November 2018.
Original gravity: 1.105.
Bottling date: 17 October 2017
Final gravity: ??
Estimated ABV: Probably 12–15%

Yield:

  • 1 x 750mL swing-top wine bottle.
  • 1 x 22 oz. beer bottle.
  • 3 x 500mL wine bottle

Total: 2.9L.

Observations

  • 2018-11-12T11:02: There's already plenty of bubbling in the carboy.
  • 2019-02-10: added tea bags to the carboy.
  • 2019-02-11T11:07: The mead in the carboy is already noticeably darker, and there's carbon dioxide discharge again: wonder if that tea has sugar in it. Guess it must, if it's made with actual fruit.
  • 2019-05-25: Bottled without measuring gravity, yielding 2.9 liters of mead probably in the range of 12%–15%.