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Recipe & Process
Recipe & Process
Primary
Primary
Original Volume: Was aiming for 3 gal but in retrospect, I think we came in under (presumably due to losing water content in the honey during caramelization).
~10.2 lbs baker's honey, caramelized
2.44 gal water
1 packet Lalvin 71B yeast
Secondary
Secondary
Final Volume: 3 gal
1/4 cup of oaked bourbon tincture
10 cups of fortified cold brew
See "Making Secondary Ingredients" for details
Gravity & ABV
Gravity & ABV
OG was 1.118
FG was 1.016 after 48 days
Finished ABV was 13.39%
Estimated ABV after secondary additions is 13.7%
Nutrients
Nutrients
1 tsp boiled yeast slurry at pitch
1.25 tsp boiled yeast slurry once a day for the first 4 days
Offgas the mead before adding nutrients
Timeline - Pitch to Bottle
Timeline - Pitch to Bottle
Pitched on 05/16/2020
Racked on 07/01/2020
Secondary additions went in on 07/03/2020
07/31/2020
1.5 gallons of this was blended to make Black Dragon's Blood
1 gallon was re-racked into a carboy for more bulk aging
~1/2 gallon was bottled!
11-01-2020 the final 1 gal was blended into another Black Dragon's Blood batch, thus completing this mead
Making Secondary Ingredients
Making Secondary Ingredients
Fortified Cold Brew
Fortified Cold Brew
6.25 cups concentrated cold brew
3.75 cups Four Roses bourbon
I cold brewed 0.5 gal of coffee using 12 oz of grounds for about 24 hours. This was intended to be a very strong coffee, so that it would not become an overly diluted "watery coffee" flavor when mixed into the mead.
Next I mixed it with Four Roses at a ratio chosen to create a coffee bourbon blend with 15% ABV. The total volume of this addition ended up being about 10 cups.
Oaked Bourbon Tincture
Oaked Bourbon Tincture
18 oz bourbon
30 g oak chips
This was pretty easy, I just put the bourbon and the oak chips into an old jelly jar and let it soak. The 30 g of oak chips was chosen purely because it's the size of the oak chips sample bag I ended up with.
You may want to add more or less of your tincture depending on its strength. My tincture was soaked for a little under 2 months.
Tasting Notes
Tasting Notes
You definitely gotta love oaked / barrel-aged stuff and coffee, but we do, so this is pretty great. It's surprisingly tasty even young, and I'm excited to see how it ages.
The ~1/2 gallon that we bottled first is from the tail end of the batch and has some of the oak sediment so the oak flavors are on steroids. It's a little less intense when that sediment is given time to settle out, and I expect it will be less intense in the gallon that we re-racked for bulk aging. The vanilla gets lost when the oak is beefed up like this, but it's present otherwise. The coffee is a great addition and beefs up the flavor profile nicely.
It's pretty smooth with minimal burn for something that, as of writing, isn't even 3 months old yet! Easily one of my favorites so far. The intensity does mean you drink this much more like a whiskey though - it's decidedly not a light "crushable" brew for a hot summer's day.
Retrospective
Retrospective
Process Improvement
Process Improvement
I tried too hard to math out a precise amount of product and ended up with not enough - I should err more on the side of too much product. If we come up short, it can be difficult to figure out what to fill headspace with, but a little too much product can easily go into a mason jar and/or simply be drank right away.
The bright side of all that headspace is it gave us room to add the fortified cold brew, which expanded the flavor profile fantastically.
Recipe Improvements
Recipe Improvements
Honey was caramelized, as probably goes without saying, since this is a bochet! But something started to smell weird, and the baker's honey we had came very dark out of the bucket, so it started looking coffee black levels of dark very quickly. It all scared us into under-cooking the honey a bit - which isn't necessarily a problem, but we definitely could have been more aggressive with cooking the honey to get more complex flavors like smoke. The lightly roasted honey we ended up with does have the tradeoff of being drinkable pretty quickly, though, due to the lowered complexity of our flavor profile.
Although the under-cooked bochet would have been a bit plain on its own, I suspect that it contributes to how quickly this brew becomes drinkable. Heavily burnt honey, based on my experience with the Pear Bochet, requires much more time to calm down.
Additionally, taste tests indicate that the coffee-bourbon blend and oaked bourbon tinctures are really fleshing the flavor profile out successfully. It seems it's OK to under-cook the honey a bit if you're planning to add a lot of other flavors.
I suspect that this would need a bit of balancing to stand on its own, especially as I have been practicing my acid/tannin balancing since brewing this. I suspect the balance may be part of why I like blending it with other brews so much, especially fruited meads that I haven't really been leaving on the fruit long enough. The tannins and bitterness this carries with it has helped to flesh out fruit meads with underdeveloped tannins of their own.
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