Now bring us some figgy liquor...

For those of you following along at home, back in May I started a 6 gallon batch of honey mead. I used slow-fermenting Red Star Cotes des Blanc yeast, which is said to be good at preserving fruity characteristics. Since I've learned that fermenting with wine yeasts at high temperatures (70 degrees plus) creates fusel alcohols (perfectly safe to consume, but they impart a harsh medicinal flavor to the mead) I set the fermenting mead in a water bath, added ice nightly and wrapped the 6-gallon vessel with wet towels so that evaporation would keep the temperatures lower than room temperature. While I'm several weeks tardy in racking that mead, I sampled some today and have to say that my water bath efforts appear to have paid off. The mead, as-is, has a faint tinge of sweetness, definite honey flavor and almost no "rocket fuel" harshness. All those years of fermenting high-temperature ales kinda undercut me on the learning curve here, but I'm finally catching up.

So, what to do with six gallons of mead? I'm not one to be content with a simple show mead, you know. A fruity melomel is in order. Be warned: What follows is a tale of woe. Last weekend, The Wife asked me to clean out the deep freeze. Way down deep I found several bags of frozen plums from last year, two big bags of figs and about 15 pounds worth of skinned prickly pear fruit. I was very proud of those prickly pear. I'd hunted for them all summer, keeping an eye on various cactus patches around and swooping in when they ripened to that gorgeous deep black-purple. Then I skinned them. The juice, an intense magenta-maroon, is gorgeous but stains everything. The tiny, hair-like thorns invariably prick me (despite leather work gloves) and are a hassle to remove. So you can imagine my despair yesterday, a full week after I cleaned out the freezer of other, unwanted foodstuffs, that The Wife asks what I had in the leaking bag sitting on the other side of the freezer. Yeah. I'd set a 10-pound bag of prickly pear aside and completely forgotten about it. It was completely ruined. All that effort, literally down the drain. I could've cried.

The good news is that I found 4 pounds of frozen and skinned prickly pear that I hadn't thoughtlessly left out of the freezer for a week. I put these in a covered pot and let thaw overnight, then mashed with a potato masher to release more of the juice. I took the 7 pounds of frozen figs, sliced them up, then did the same in a separate pot. Some homebrewers only use fresh, unfrozen fruit, but not me. I always freeze it. One reason is that I rarely have enough fresh fruit at any one time to start a batch of homemade fermentables, but the biggest reason is that freezing ruptures cell walls like nobody's business, and the fruit pulp sheds juice so very, very easily. Take a look at these figs. By morning they were swimming in a thick, golden syrup, even more than you see here:

I have to say, the figs smelled wonderful. They should pair with the honey mead very, very with with complementary flavors. The 4 pounds of prickly pear was more challenging, but egads, what gorgeous color that juice produces:

Prickly pear isn't an entirely cooperative fruit. You have to cook it before fermenting, otherwise it will foam up and create an unholy mess. But if you bring it to a boil, the fruit pectin will set and you've got prickly pear jelly. So I simmered the fruit for 45 minutes, keeping careful track of the temperature, stirring often and never letting it come to a boil. Cooking released more juices, and once it cooled, I strained the whole mess through a nylon mesh brewing bag. When all was said and done, I had approximately 3 quarts of prickly pear juice--a far cry from what I'd planned for before ruining those other 10 pounds of fruit, but enough to work with at least. So, here are the recipes for my latest experiments:

Fig Melomel (4 gallons)
7 lbs. sliced figs
2 tsp. yeast energizer
1 tsp. yeast nutrient
2 tsp. pectic enzyme
3/4 tsp. grape tannin
fill with honey mead

Prickly Pear Melomel (3 gallons)
3 quarts prickly pear juice (4 lbs. skinned prickly pear fruit)
1.5 tsp. yeast energizer
1 tsp yeast nutrient
1.5 tsp. pectic enzyme
1.2 tsp. grape tannin
fill with honey mead

If you can do math, you'll see that's a grand total of 7 gallons of melomel now racked up in various containers. The volume of the figs and prickly pear more than made up for what I lost to the dregs during racking. The residual Cotes des Blanc yeast suspended in the mead has woken up in both batches, and is generating steady amounts of CO2 as it consumes the fruit sugars from the figs and prickly pears. It's not an aggressive fermentation, but relaxed and steady, just what I want. A slow fermentation will preserve more of the fruit flavors in the long run. If I can get them to ferment out dry, or at least semi-dry, then I may well have some real winners once I bottle them up.

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