![]() ![]() Buy fruit when it is fresh and inexpensive freeze it if you aren’t ready to use it right away. Use your imagination, or peruse the breakfast juice blends at the grocery store for ideas. Fruit blends can produce some great-tasting meads. Jon Hamilton at White Winter Winery puts the fruit in primary for all of his meads.Ī good starting point with most fruits is about 3 pounds of fruit per gallon of mead, though I have been known to use 5 or even 6 pounds of fruit. Different ester profiles are also attained from exposing the fruit to primary fermentation. However, fruit will typically have additional nutrients not found in honey, aiding in fermentation. Some mead makers believe that some of the fruit aroma is lost during primary fermentation. Putting fruit in the primary is my preferred way of making fruit meads. Crystallized honey is fine for mead making. Remember, most honeys are not going to taste like the fruit from the floral source-orange blossom honey does not taste like oranges, for example. Honey is heavy and thus expensive to ship, so it’s desirable to use locally sourced honey if possible. Honey can have year-to-year variation even from the same beekeeper and floral source. ![]() Wildflower honey varies significantly based on locale and season of harvest. Wildflower honey is a “generic” honey from assorted varieties of flowers-not from a single floral source. The names refer to the floral source the bees visited to collect the nectar. Good beginner honeys include orange blossom, tupelo, raspberry blossom, mesquite, cotton, clover, and some wildflower varieties. For metheglins, melomels, and braggots, it is desirable for the honey to complement the characteristics of the other ingredients, so honey choice requires additional thought. The dominant aspect of most meads, and the primary fermentable sugar, is honey, which is where the character of a straight honey mead will come from. Other innovative ideas from award-winning mead makers are also incorporated into the process. Using techniques from the commercial winemaking world allows mead to be made faster and require less aging than previously thought possible. Making good mead is easy, if you build on Ken Schramm’s The Compleat Meadmaker methods but update them with his latest recommendations. Originally published in the July/August 2011 issue of Zymurgy magazine. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |