Going from a suggestion by a friend, I figure it’ll be a good idea to post monthly updates on what’s happening with the mead projects.
October 2015-
Still in primary:
The light honey mead, from local Montana honey purchased at Costco. It’s still bubbling away, and I’ll probably put it in secondary next week. Happy with the way it tastes and with the SG.
Moved to secondary:
Cyser- honey, apple cider, spices (nutmeg and cinnamon). It tastes great, but I honestly can’t taste the booze in it. That could be a very good thing or a very bad thing, depending. I went light on the spices, which turned out to be a good decision.
Utah honey mead- turned into a gallon and 1/3, so I need to buy some marbles to raise the level in the second carboy.
1 gallon using the same honey I made the 5 gallon batch out of. So far, it’s very consistent in how it tastes.
1 gallon of coffee mead. Jury’s out on this one. I can taste a little coffee, but overall it’s very, very harsh. Going to leave it in secondary for a while.
1 gallon from honey a co-worker found at a local farmer’s market. Also a bit on the harsh side.
I’ve got plans to start two five gallon batches, so we have something to enjoy next summer. I also found some culinary lavender at Pike Place Market and am curious to see what that will do with a mead. Finally, the co-op had killer bee honey on sale, from Brazil. I’ll use that for just a plain mead. The honey’s got an interesting flavor that I don’t want to influence with spices.
So that’s what’s fermenting and in the works for this month. I’m hoping the cyser will be ready to drink around New Year’s. I’ll see how it goes.
Eventually I needed to get around to introducing the dogs this blog is named for. Here you go:
Griffin- who a 10-11ish year old Doberman from the Baltimore SPCA. His previous owners left him in the lobby overnight, with nothing but a collar with his name on it. It took him all of two days (and one attempt to mark the couch) for him to settle in. I got very lucky with this dog. He’s been my road trip buddy for 7 years, and retired from that last fall. He has Wobblers, and riding in a car for long distances is no longer comfortable for him. It honestly broke my heart to make that call, especially since it happened right before Viking arrived. I was hoping for a year or two of road trips with both dogs, but it wasn’t in the cards. He’s a professional couch potato now. He pretty much does whatever makes him happy, and that’s how it should be.
Cannon Beach, OR, 2014
Viking- who is really, honestly 100% German Shepherd. Or, depending on who you ask, a purebred Lab, a wolf hybrid, or a straight up wolf. He’s from Blackthorn Kennel’s Z-litter. He’s definitely a dog who needs a job, so we’re working on tracking and IPO. I’m also teaching him some service dog tasks, just to see how he does. He is still a puppy… but serious and thoughtful, and has loads of confidence. I’m very happy with this boy! He also worships the ground Griffin walks on, and he’s got some big paws to fill as a road trip dog. More in the future about puppies, breeders, and two dogs living together. Blackthorn matched Viking for me, and he’s a perfect fit.
Recipe Type: Extract
Yeast: Lalvin K1v1116
Yeast Starter: yes
Batch Size (Gallons): 5
Original Gravity: 1.120
Final Gravity: 1.010
IBU: n/a
Steep Time (Minutes): 45
Color: golden brown
Primary Fermentation (# of Days & Temp): 15 days at 68F
Secondary Fermentation (# of Days & Temp): 35 days at 68F
Steep grains in 1.5 gallons of apple juice at 155F for 45 minutes and remove from heat. Stir in the DME and honey. Rinse grain sack with 1/2 gallon apple juice. Add the remainder of the apple juice. Aerate by vigorous stirring for at least five minutes. Aerate some more. I now use oxygen with a diffuser stone to aerate (better). Pitch yeast starter (hydrated with Go Ferm per container instructions) directly into the primary (plastic pail fitted with an air lock).
At about 1.075 add 5g Fermaid K
At about 1.035 add 5g Fermaid K
(Dissolve your nutrients in water before adding them to your must. This helps to minimize foam.)
Within about two weeks this should ferment out to 1.012 or so. Rack to secondary and add vanilla beans. Allow to remain in the secondary for about a month.
Rack again onto 1 lb of buckwheat honey and 1/4t potassium metabisuphite or 5 campden tabs and 2 1/2t potassium sorbate to stabilize. Add Super Kleer to clarify. Bulk age for six months to a year before bottling.
I adapted this recipe from one I saw on gotmead.com. Mine is about 14 months old and tastes just like caramel apples. It’s a medium sweet mead that’s very drinkable. At about 13.75% alcohol and no alcohol bite one should exercise caution since it goes down so smoothly.
((Credit goes to SummerSolstice on Homebrewtalk Mead Forums.
Last year, I got hooked on homebrewing mead. Before I moved out to Wyoming from Virginia, I’d picked up a do-it-yourself mead kit from the Maryland RenFaire. It seemed simple enough. Toss honey, water, and the yeast packet and spices that came with the kit into a 1 gallon jug and let it ride. The one downside? If you’re not careful about keeping things sanitized, and I wasn’t, you’ll wind up getting mold and other goodies in there.
That batch went into the trash. I still wanted to brew my own mead, so I figured I’d go about doing things the correct way. I got a book, hit the interwebs, and bought some supplies. Fast forward a year and I’ve got several batches going, three that I’ve bottled, and I now have a slightly better idea about what I’m doing. I’ve also screwed up a few times. I created bottle bombs and brewed a batch with buckwheat honey that’s been nicknamed the shitty buckwheat mead. That one, I’m hoping will be good after it’s aged. For a very, very long time. I took some advice from an experienced meadmaker and put those bottles in a closet. I’ll check on them again after a year if I remember. Or maybe when I move and find some bonus mead in the closet that I’d managed to forget about.
Needless to say, I’m by no means an expert. Every time I start something up, I wind up on a forum like GotMead or the Mead facebook group with questions. The best advice I can give about mead is go listen to someone who knows what the fuck they’re doing. Experiment on your own, too.
Because homebrewing is great. You can make some very good stuff while saving a shitload of money at the same time. Startup costs can run over $150, depending on what you buy, but most of it is a one time purchase. Also why it’s important to get a carboy tote, so you don’t drop your 6 gallon carboy on the floor. That lesson I learned from someone else’s mistake.
Here’s what I started with:
6 gallon carboy
Food-grade plastic bucket for primary fermentation
Airlocks
Star-San sanitizer
Thermometer
Hydrometer
Stock pot (found this one at a thrift shop)
Wine bottles (cheap to buy at a brewshop, you can also save your own)
Corks (buy decent ones, esp. if you’ll be leaving it in bottles for a long time)
Wine corker
Yeast energizer and nutrient
Siphon
That got me started. Some vendors sell wine-making kits that are sometimes cheaper than buying things individually. I reuse wine bottles too. Once they’re empty, wash and sanitize, and they’re ready to go.
My five gallon batch yielded 21 bottles. I’ve heard some people get more than that, but not all of the mead made it into a bottle. You have to sample it, after all. Around here, decent mead sells for 12-18 dollars a bottle. And no, I’m not talking about Chaucer’s. I’m sure I’ll do more ragging on Chaucer’s in the future, but suffice to say that mead should not taste like jacked up cough syrup and if you’re paying six bucks a bottle… well, sometimes you really do get what you pay for.
Anyway. Average it out to fifteen bucks a bottle, and I made over $300 worth of mead for a startup cost of around $150. After you get all of your initial gear, the most expensive part will be buying honey. Honey will also be in a future post, since it’s kind of important.
Hibiscus mead, three different plain honey meads.
Since then, I’ve added 3 gallon and 1 gallon glass carboys, and spices. The most recent purchase was a 5 gallon plastic one for an experiment to see if there’s any taste difference between glass and plastic. For science!
Greetings. I’ve had quite a few people tell me I should blog, and I figured now was a good time to bite the bullet and do it.
Expect to find any topic I’m in the mood to write about. Dogs, rum, hiking, parks, coffee, homebrew mead, fish, writing, Jeeps, more rum, more dogs. Depending on how things go, or how much I’ve had to drink, I’ll venture into the twin shitstorms of politics and religion. Those two things are best discussed with friends and booze… or on a blog, where you can say whatever the hell you want and moderate the comments for any fuckery.
What else should I mention? The dogs, probably, since they’re generally awesome and half of the reason why the blog is called Rumhounds. Mead is my other interest, but it doesn’t quite have the same ring to it. Internet isn’t fast enough for photos right now, but I’ll get them posted eventually.
There’s Griffin, who’s somewhere around 10-11ish, and a sweet ol’ couch potato disguised as a Doberman. Best dog.
And Viking, who’s an 8 month old German Shepherd. Definitely not a couch potato. Usually sweet unless you’re a small mammal, a tug toy, or a sock. Best puppy.
We live in Wyoming, where I work in a park, homebrew mead, and mess around with writing. Also blog… which I intend to do on a regular basis. I have to admit that it’s a good way to let friends and family know what’s going on and a very nice platform for me to ramble on about random topics.
rumhounds 