This locust varietal is one of the many honeys we brought back from our pre-shutdown road trip through the South. The apiary is from Del Rio, Tennessee, although I won't claim to remember where we purchased this particular jar. Because parallel varietal batches from different locations appear to be my jam, I made batch 202 with North Carolina locust honey the same day. This one was named after the highly topical Warren Zevon song, not the historical British foreign policy.

Confession time: The Wyeast mead and cider yeast I used in batches 201, 202, and 203 was a full 3 years out of date, which means we must have moved it across the country from California with us. We just never got around to using it. It took a bit longer than usual to get started, but it wound up fermenting like a champ after a couple of days. If that's not a seal of quality, I don't know what is.

Ingredients in this batch

  • 35.5 oz Tennessee mountain locust honey from Strange Honey Farm in Del Rio, TN
  • 3/8 tsp Fermaid K
  • 3/8 tsp Fermaid O
  • 1/3 batch of catastrophically expired (see above) Wyeast 4632 dry mead and cider yeast, reactivated with the included smack pack and left to come to room temp

Process

Tossed everything in a carboy, agitated, and pitched. SG was 1.078. All three of these batches had a longer-than-normal lag period, but all began fermenting after 2-3 days and were still going a week and a half later.

I bottled this batch on 8/2. I estimated ABV at 10.5%. This one's pleasant but not terribly interesting yet.