Cyser Bochet

Recipe & Process

Primary

• 3 gal organic apple juice from Costco

• 5 lbs caramelized honey

• 1-2 lbs honey*

• 1.5 tsp cinnamon

• Dash of nutmeg (this seems strong, use sparingly)

• 3 tsp pectic enzyme**

• 1 packet Lalvin 71B yeast

*Basically what I did was caramelize less than the total amount of honey I expected to need to hit my target OG. Then I just added small amounts of honey and measured SG until I hit my target gravity. But, as a result of this method, I don't actually know exactly how much normal honey was added.

This could be problematic if you were trying to buy exact amounts of grocery store honey up front, but if you've got a large stock of honey, it won't bother you much. If it helps, you could probably get away with adding sugar to top off the gravity, as most of the flavors you get from here should come from either the caramelized honey or the apples.

**My pectic enzyme didn't arrive until I was a week into fermentation. It's less effective in the presence of alcohol, and since I was already at about 11.55% ABV by then, I added more than you will need if you add pectic enzyme at the start.

Secondary

• 1.5 tsp cinnamon

Gravity & ABV

• OG 1.118

• FG 1.016 after 21 days

• ABV ~13.39%

Nutrients

• 1 tbsp boiled yeast slurry at pitch

• 1 tbsp boiled yeast slurry once a day for the first 3 days

• Offgas the mead before adding nutrients

Timeline - Pitch to Bottle

• Pitched on 06/13/2020

• Racked 07/03/2020

  • It would technically have been better to see 2 consecutive and identical gravity readings separated by 3-7 days before racking. I racked anyway because the single point drop during the week between the final 2 readings is within the margin of error for our homebrew tools, and 1.016 also happens to be exactly where our other bochet with the same yeast finished.

• Bottled circa 08/15/2020

Retrospective

Process Improvement

• My pectic enzyme didn't arrive until I was a week into fermentation, so I may have added more than necessary.

Recipe Improvements

• Cinnamon and nutmeg didn't really come through the other end of fermentation. I have since learned that such spices should pretty much always go into secondary, as fermentation tends to obliterate them.

• This tastes young - the bochet and alcohol together have quite a bit of burn. But I like what's there under the burn; I think this will age very nicely. Hopefully I remember to update this in like a year with another tasting.

Tastings

11/28/2020

• Still has the young heat to it, not bad but needs more time to age and meld for sure. I don't think it needs to be "fixed" or anything but it's also not currently in a state where I'm particularly eager to open it again compared to some other stuff that's just doesn't need to be aged out so long.

04/08/2021

• Much better than the previous tasting. It straight up smells like apple pie, the apple and spices come through wonderfully in the nose and the bochet aromatics push it right into that "cooked spice apple" you expect from an apple pie. Honestly as far as the nose is concerned, 10/10 that is exactly what I was aiming for.

• The back end of the palate is still harsh, possibly astringent? It is possible that this should have been balanced with some tannins, considering it was brewed before I either knew about or was implement acid-tanning balancing. High ABV apple juice-driven mead seems logically like it would have a lot of acid and not much access to tannins. Though I also think some of the aggressive bochet flavors simply haven't aged out yet, and it will be better-balanced with even more age.

06/28/2022

Now just over 2 years old, the mead has had a fair bit of time to age. Though I've read that bochets often take 3-5 years to really age into their own, so it's possible this needs more time, I think by this stage we should have a good sense of the trajectory of this mead. Here's what I found:

• The nose is still quite pleasant, clearly a cyser with forward apple aroma and a hint of the pie spices.

• Front portion of the taste is similarly apple dominant with a little of the spices

• The middle to back portion of the tasting experience is empty with a little bit of harshness. Not overly acrid - but not great, and nothing to balance it out.

• It noticeably lacks the sweetness I have come to expect when tasting apple, which is sorely missed in a mead that was inspired by apple pie.

I observe here that in my previous tasting from over a year ago I also thought that this might have been lacking balance (specifically, short on tannins). What I'm seeing so far is that while aging is slowly rounding out the harsh edges of the bochet flavor profile, it isn't introducing body/tannins/sweetness where they did not exist. I now expect that this mead is likely to continue to age into a less harsh version of itself but not likely to develop the comprehensive and balanced flavor profile I was hoping for. It needed more tannin, body, and sweetness for the aging process to have something to work with.

I will continue to check in on the remaining bottles probably annually or so to see how the bochet flavors age. But ultimately if I brewed this again I would use more honey to crank the sweetness up a fair bit, and I would probably try to introduce tannins somehow - perhaps via the addition of actual apples rather than just the juice in the hopes that the skin exposure could do the trick. The exact method would take some more research to see how other successful apple-driven recipes typically balance out.

But most importantly in the future I will not bottle a mead like this until it had time to age. Because this has already been bottled I can't balance it further... it's stuck in a place where most likely the best it can hope for is to become less offensive, but the hopes that it will someday be good - when it's still lacking this much after 2 years - are largely dashed.

This was a good idea, and I think these flavors could be combined very successfully with some of the aforementioned modifications. What I have on my hands right now, unfortunately, I don't think age alone will fix. But only time will tell for sure!