Black Dragon's Blood

Recipe

• 5.5 liters of Dragon's Blood

• 6.5 liters of Oaked Bourbon Bochet

ABV

• Estimated ABV is 14.56%

Timeline - Pitch to Bottle

• Blended on 07/31/2020

• Bottled on 08/03/2020

  • Both the meads that went into this had previously been racked and cleared before blending, so this was tertiary for them. We only really conditioned long enough to make sure it was blended.

  • Also, I need the carboy for other meads that are coming out of secondary soon!

Notes

Both of these brews were pretty good in their own right, but we made the delightful discovery that somehow very few of their flavors overlapped. When blended, they have a delightfully complex and full flavor profile.

You get oak and fruit in the nose. At first you taste more of the coffee and bourbon, but the tang of the mixed berries cleans up on the back of your tongue and in the retronasal.

The Oaked Bourbon Bochet was partly a result of some new brewer mistakes, but this blend is easily my favorite thing we've made so far, so I think we'll be trying to recreate it in order to perfect this.

It's exactly what I personally want in a homebrew - something with the complexity you'd expect to pay out the nose for to acquire commercially, but in a flavor profile you simply can't get commercially.

Experimentation and bench tasting on later variations of this brew suggest that this may actually require additional tannins to balance out. You can totally drink this "unbalanced" for a more acidic taste that makes it a bit more like a bourbon (more of a sipping beverage), but the balanced version is more "crushable" (much easier to simply drink). Overall, I am leaning more towards the crushable version - I can always just literally get bourbon if I want bourbon.