For my 40th birthday this year, we drove down to New Mexico. We had great plans: stay in an Earthship, finally visit Meow Wolf in Santa Fe, and eat all the red chile sauce I can shake a stick at. (It's superior to green. Fight me on this.) The actual trip was mired by some food poisoning (not from any red chile sauce) for both of us, bad weather, and getting stuck in Colorado Springs for a day on the way back thanks to the impressively named bomb cyclone. But we did manage to stop at the fabulous Santa Fe Honey Salon and pick up several promising varietals. In keeping with my last cactus varietal, batch 132, this mead is named for Oppenheimer Analysis' New Mexico.

Ingredients in this batch

  • 2.5 lbs Santa Fe Honey Salon cactus honey, plus another 7 oz (the rest of the jar) added on 5/2
  • 1 tsp LD Carlson yeast nutrient
  • ½ tsp LD Carlson yeast energizer
  • ⅓ batch Lalvin 1122 yeast, rehydrated

Process

Mixed this up on 4/7. As expected, it fermented bone dry, so I backsweetened on 5/2 with the remainder of the 3-lb jar of honey.

I bottled this batch on 11/13. FG was 1.006, and with an adjusted SG of 1.094, that puts ABV at about 11.6%.