In a weak moment and for a silly amount of money, I picked up a whole gallon of tupelo honey in our recent group buy at Queen Bee Brews. A lot of mazers gush about this honey, which is obviously hard to come by anywhere I've lived and usually only available for a short time each year. Deborah at Queen Bee tells me that this is an especially good year for tupelo; fingers crossed.

I wanted to make a five-gallon batch to showcase this fancy honey, and I used a Belgian ale yeast to try to retain more of its subtleties than wine yeast might. I started with a healthy dose of clover honey to make absolutely sure I wouldn't run out of tupelo before the yeast gave out. The batch is named after a burger I had a few weeks after starting this batch at Zombie Burger in Des Moines, Iowa... and after Tupelo, Mississippi's most, ahem, only famous son, of course.

Ingredients in this batch

  • 4 lbs Kirkland clover honey
  • 10 lbs Moon Shine Trading Co. Florida white tupelo honey, plus another 2 lbs added on 5/2
  • 2 tsp Fermaid K
  • 2 1/2 tsp Fermaid O, plus 5 tsp added on 4/15
  • 1 pack White Labs WLP545 Belgian strong ale yeast

Process

I made this mead on 4/7 meaning to do a proper staggered nutrient addition schedule. Someone was dreadfully forgetful about that, so I wound up dumping in the remaining 5 tsp Fermaid O all in one go on 4/15. When we tasted this mead on 5/2, it had fermented dry, and I added another 2 pounds of honey.

On July 1, I racked this batch to remove some of the yeast sludge. It's hard to tell how well it's clarifying in the 5-gallon carboy, but it seems to be doing well.