Metheglin and apfelwein

Back on December 12 I wrote that my current batch of mead had pretty much fermented dry, and that I planned to let it sit for a week or two before racking. Well, on December 24 I took that step, and racked the dry mead into a three-gallon glass carboy. I have to say (and this was my experience with the old Mr. Beer fermenter as well) that having a spigot at the bottom of the vessel makes racking sooooo much easier than siphoning from the top of a carboy.

I placed the primary vessel on the raised level of the kitchen bar, and set the glass carboy in the sink, linking the two with a clear siphon hose. Needless to say, I sanitized the hose and carboy with bleach (and thoroughly rinsed) prior to this step. I removed the airlock from the primary and stuffed a wadded paper towel in the opening, so as to allow air to flow but limit other contaminants.

As the mead transferred itself to its new home via the miracle of gravity, I prepared my secret ingredients that will turn this somewhat bland wildflower honey wine into a spiffy-keen metheglin. First up: Vanilla beans. I used two Rodelle Madagascar vanilla beans, mainly because that was readily available at the local HEB Plus. No Mexican vanilla beans to be had, unfortunately. I split these beans in two and the pasty innards immediately began throwing off a rich, sweet vanilla scent. Very nice. The potency of these beans is significantly higher than the previous beans I used, as I remember, although that was three or four years back and my memory isn't always accurate.

Next up, Icewine Tea. We picked this up a few years ago on a brief visit to Vancouver, and it turned out to be an amazing addition to a previous metheglin. Essentially, it's tea infused with ice wine and/or the pre-fermented juice from grapes destined to become ice wine. Most icewine tea is black tea, and I'd assumed for a long time that's what this was. But now that I look at the label, I realize this is herbal tea, not black. The "herbal" ingredients include rooibos, rosehips and hibiscus. I'm not a huge fan of rooibos, but in hindsight the earthy/spicy notes that worked so well in the icewine tea metheglin I made before are directly attributable to that rooibos. Curious.

Into the three gallons of mead, I added the two split vanilla beans and six bags of icewine tea.

Here's a closer look. In the days since, dissolved CO2 in the mead has gradually worked its way out of solution and pushed the tea bags up into the neck of the carboy. This has resulted in some of the mead and bits of vanilla bean bubbling up through the airlock. Yeah, that's a little messy. I've punched it down, and it seems like we've finally reached a sort of equilibrium. Already, the vanilla notes are pretty strong in the samples I've tasted, but the tea isn't noticeable yet. I'll check again in another week to see how it's progressing.

Now, we're entering unknown territory. I harvested the leftover Wyeast 1388 from the primary by "washing" it. I added roughly a gallon of boiled (then cooled) water to the primary and sloshed the mixture around to suspend the yeast, then let it settle for half an hour or so to let the trub--dead yeast and other impurities--precipitate out. Then I decanted into a large jar, and let the process of settling out repeat itself. Then I siphoned off the light yeast water into smaller jars, leaving the heavier fermentation leftovers behind. The Wyeast 1388 Belgian strong ale strain seems to be an outstanding performer for mead, at any rate, that I want to perpetuate it for future use. I ended up with five pint jars, which I placed in the refrigerator of safe keeping.

Which brings us to the apfelwein segment of our show. I've made several batches of German-style apfelwein in the past using variations of Ed Wort's recipe, and I drank the last remaining 12-ounce bottle back in November. So I've been hankering to make some more. This time, however, I've decided to use the Wyeast 1388 rather than the recommended Montrachet wine yeast, because I suspect the 1388 might preserve more of the apple flavor and aroma, as well as perform better at higher fermentation temperatures. Which, in theory, would produce a drinkable product in a shorter period of time (technically, one isn't supposed to use second-generation yeast for fermentations differing from the initial pitch, ie this yeast is attuned to honey from the previous fermentation, so isn't optimized for cider or beer or wine. I'm not convinced such evolutionary adaptations will be apparent in the second generation, so that's a risk I'm willing to take). I picked up three gallons of plain apple juice from HEB--always check to make sure there are no preservatives other than ascorbic acid. Another variant to the basic recipe I'm trying is the addition of undiluted apple juice concentrate to the juice, to increase the sugar content whilst simultaneously increasing the apple-intensity. I'd originally planned on adding four cans of concentrate, but the kids took one to make some juice.

The specific gravity of the concentrate/juice mix at this point was 1.060, which would ferment out to a 7.8 percent alcohol content. Ph at this point was 3.6. I want a little higher content to increase its keeping and aging stability, so I added 14 ounces of cane sugar, bringing up the specific gravity to 1.070. That should ferment out to around 9.1 percent ABV, which is in the range of a good riesling wine. To bring the ph up to make the must more hospitable for the yeast, I added 1 tsp potassium bicarbonate. Also, adapting the BOMM process I used for the above-mentioned metheglin, I added 3/4 tsp yeast nutrient and 2.25 tsp yeast energizer to the must. This is different from the DAP and Fermaid K I added to the honey must last go-round, but apple juice has a lot more nutrients in it for yeast to thrive on than honey does, and the basic apfelwein recipe doesn't call for any additional nutrients at all. I suspect I'm safe.

So, how to mix all these additives together and effectively aerate the must? I'm glad you asked! I just happen to have a new toy that came in shortly before Christmas that I've been wanting to try out--a drill-mounted wine degasser. After sanitizing it, I tried it out.

Works pretty well, huh? I whipped the apple juice and such up into a pretty good froth. Afterwards I checked the ph and found it to be around 4.8, which should keep the yeast happy. Earlier, I'd taken one of those bottles of yeast from the fridge and, after letting it warm to room temperature, added it to a quart jar half-filled with apple juice and a teaspoon of Go Ferm yeast nutrient. After six hours, give or take, I pitched it to the apfelwein must.

Today, the fermentation is steady although not as aggressive as I'd expected. There's a donut ring of kreusen that's formed, and a significant amount of foam built up when I degassed, but overall this is a sedate, restrained fermentation. I'm going to keep a close eye on it to make sure it doesn't stall out.

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What's Jayme drinking?

So today The Wife and drove over to Texas Mead Works in Seguin to drop off my entries for the Texas Mead Fest homebrew competition. I entered two meads--my plum melomel (which, as an aside, I have to say turned out better than my review indicated. The bottle I reviewed was not entirely full, being the last of the batch. I don't know if excess oxygen was the culprit behind the off-putting odor, but upon opening a new bottle, the bouquet was inoffensive. Yay!) and a vanilla ice wine metheglin.

Now I know what you're thinking--"Jayme, you fool! Ice wine is a specialty wine, made from frozen, late-season grapes! What you've got is a pyment, not a metheglin!" And normally, you'd be right. But I didn't use any grapes--frozen or otherwise. Follow: I started this particular mead by adding two split vanilla bean pods to the secondary fermentation. I was hoping for a mellow vanilla taste, but the mead was dry and vanilla by itself is awkward and uninspiring. Vanilla tends to enhance other flavors very well in mead, but doesn't fly solo well. I back-sweetened with additional honey, and while this improved it some, the drink as a whole was still lacking. So on a whim, I added a bag of Ice Wine Tea (black tea infused with ice wine for the curious) which we'd picked up on our vacation trip to Vancouver back in June. I steeped it in the vanilla mead for a month and hoped the flavors would play well together. They did. Ergo, this mead is a metheglin, as I added various "spices" as opposed to grapes.

How did it turn out? Fantastic! This is, without a doubt, my best mead ever. The Wife liked it, and she rarely likes my meads (with good reason--they're usually not very good!). It pours a pale, lemon-yellow. The aroma is a mix of honey and floral notes, with a slightly spicy undertone--I want to say rosemary, but that's not quite it. Mouthfeel is lightly viscous, a bit thicker than the color and scent would lead one to believe.

Taste is medium-sweet. We're not talking sack mead or port here, but more along the lines of a moscato. The tannins and acid blend I added during the fermentation process add just the right amount of counterbalance to the honey sweetness. And the honey flavor definitely comes through. Honey is the first taste that hits the tongue, followed by a tumbled rush of orange citrus, cinnamon, ginger and cloves, all held together within a floral riesling embrace. Then the honey reasserts itself, darker and more muscular than those initial honeyed flavors. This is when the alcohol makes itself known, with a distinct warming sensation in the back of the mouth and throat. I have to admit I overshot the mark on this one--I was aiming for around 11 percent alcohol, but didn't neutralized the yeast effectively when I back sweetened with more honey, and fermentation started again. I don't have an accurate measurement, but I'm guessing the final alcohol content is pretty close to 13 percent.

This is a deceptively light, easily drinkable mead that packs a stealthy punch. It is not syrupy, but definitely sweet. The spicy flavors are easy to pick out individually, but collectively they're disconcerting (in a good way). I really, really like this one, and need to work on standardizing the recipe so I can 1) replicate this beverage reliably and 2) make a larger batch next time.

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Experimenting with mead

Astute readers will remember that I started a three-gallon batch of mead fermenting (that's nine pounds of honey) back in July. After letting it sit far too long, I finally got off my lazy duff and racked it. Not being particularly enamoured of show meads, I had experimental designs on this batch. So I experimented.

Firstly, I racked a portion of the fermented mead into a 2.5 gallon fermentation vessel I have. Into this vessel I had placed approximately 4 pounds of Santa Rosa plums, picked fresh from my backyard tree, sliced and frozen, then thawed and crushed. Santa Rosas have a tartness to them that my jucier, sweeter Methleys don't, so I'm hoping the combination works with the mead to create a strongly-flavored melomel. Into the vessel I added a teaspoon of pectic enzyme, a quarter teaspoon of acid blend and a quarter teaspoon of tannin. The plums may have contributed enough acid and tannin on their own, but I've made too many meads with a flat flavor profile to take any chances. It's got a slow, gentle fermentation going right now, so we'll see how things shake out in the next month or so.

For the remaining mead, which amounted to a little over half a gallon, I racked into a 1.5 gallon fermentation vessel. And here's where I get a little daring. I bought a pound of crushed, smoked malt from Home Brew Party a couple months ago for this very purpose. I'm an extract kit kind of homebrewer, you see. I've done the "boil the mash" thing, and while that approach gives the brewer lots of control over the final product, it was too labor intensive for my enjoyment. But since nobody really sells smoked malt extract, I had to do it myself. I cooked the malt at 150 degrees, more or less, for an hour (there was a protein rest there at the beginning) then drained off the liquid malt and sparged once. The resulting sweet liquid (the smoky scent was strong when I started the starch conversion, but tapered off the longer it was heated) I let cool then added to the racked mead, giving me right at 1 gallon. Then I added slightly less than a teaspoon of acid blend and a like amount of tannin to the mix. It's fermenting slowly now. I have 1.5 pounds of honey I'm going to add to bring the total volume up to 1.5 gallons, at which point I will add one jalapeño pepper to make this a smoked jalapeño metheglin (as opposed to a chipotle metheglin). My previous attempt at a concoction of this nature resulted in Liquid Heat which was very strong on the fresh, raw pepper flavor and full of heat. I want to rein that in a bit to make this more palatable for those who aren't thrill seekers, so I'm going to cut the pepper and remove the seeds first. Heresy, I know. I may even grill the pepper a bit first, to blunt some of that rawness and make the flavor blend more with the smoked malt. In any event, this will be an unusual braggot-style mead once I'm finished. I'll keep you posted on my progress.

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More on the mead

I found myself with a tiny bit of free time today, and took the opportunity to print and label some of my mead. The mint metheglin, you may recall, was conjured on the request of The Wife last June, and had languished unlabeled (apart from some masking tape with Sharpie). The mint's in bloom right now, but a couple of weeks ago when I put together this layout, it wasn't. Ah well. I think the triangle works quite nicely overall.



The blueberry melomel, well, I always knew I'd use a berry as the main design element. All of my previous labels had been so rectangular, I wanted to break away from that design mindset. So berry-shaped it was. I think I've done okay with these last two. I still have the maypop to label, but I don't know how much effort I'll put into it, since the final product is pretty bland.

The Blueberry Thrill, of course, needs quite a bit more aging before it'll begin to be palatable. The bar is set pretty high for it, however--the other week The Wife and I visited The Grapevine in Gruene, and they had some blueberry wine from the Piney Woods Winery in east Texas. Wow. That stuff was stunning. I suspect my blueberry-infused mead won't even come close. The mint, on the other hand, should be plenty ready to drink. I'm not really a mint person, so I'm waiting on The Wife to uncork one...

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