Black Dragon's Bomb

This looks like it might be a challenging ferment. I've seen bochets struggle a little early, and I've seen a 1.160 OG mead stall a little early, and this has both. I've rounded up in a few spots to try and make sure the yeast are happy and healthy.

First is pitch rate - 15g would've worked per the pitch rate used on other no-waters like the Cherry Bomb, but I rounded up a whole extra packet to 20g.

For nutrients - I used bal's YAN Nutrient Calculator to figure out my target ppm YAN, and used the offset Cory suggested here (150 ppm since I'm at very close to 6 lbs / gal fruit) to account for the organic nitrogen from fruit. But this time, I also set the yeast nitrogen requirement to medium, as Storm suggests doing in his video on no water nutrition when pushing the limits. This gave me 226 ppm YAN.

I also figured out how to zero out Fermaid O in bal's spreadsheet - not sure why that didn't work for me last time - so I was able to use just that spreadsheet for my nutrient math.

As an extra note, I didn't do the math on the exact amount of bentonite that should've been used here. I remember it being suggested that you should use a little bit more bentonite than the package instructions call for if you add it dry directly to primary, and my package instructions called for 4 tsp at 5 gallons. I'm closer to 4 gallons so I just rounded it up to 5 tsp and figured that was probably good enough.

I have a filter I'll use if it doesn't clear for me, so I'm not super concerned about precision with bentonite.

Mead Stampede 2022 Results

We entered this brew into the Mead Stampede 2022 competition where it score 37.5 points! This score is a huge improvement over the original Black Dragon's Blood variant of the recipe I entered in 2021 which I am extremely happy to see.

And most importantly - this proves A BOCHET FRUIT BOMB IS POSSIBLE!

It was also interesting to see that, in this case, one judge gave it a 35 whereas the other scored it at 40 (in contrast to Parle Bleu, where both judges gave it a 40). It's possible this mead's flavor profile is a little more polarizing!

That said, both judges did agree on many fronts. Namely, that the mead was a little muddied, with many strong flavors that competed a little too much to fully complement each other - the bochet flavors in particular overwhelmed the fruit and chocolate.

I would attribute some of this to the age of the bochet. I took the caramelization quite dark, which I've heard folks saying may take 3-5 years of age to fully meld. It is also possible that some of the muddiness is due to the mixed berry bags including several different fruits.

On a probable next iteration of the brew, I will go for lighter caramelization in the bochet, and select a single fruit - probably raspberry, as that flavor was the most prominent of the fruits, so focusing on it should help improve the existing flavor profile whereas blackberry or blueberry would likely redirect it.

Plus - I have other successful no-water recipes for marionberry (a varietal of blackberry) and blueberry, but none yet as of writing for raspberry.

That all said, as far as this current batch goes - I still have it in a carboy, so I can make changes, it's just a little unfortunate that most of the feedback requires a new batch to put into action. But I can just keep aging this to see how it develops as the bochet flavors meld and round out, and that's exactly what I'll do!

That probably means you won't hear further updates on this specific batch, as it'll get tucked away for what I'm guessing will be at least a couple years. But I'm looking forward to reviewing it when it's aged and iterating on it in the meantime!

Black Dragon's Bomb Scoresheet.pdf

Timeline Pitch to Bottle

05/02/2021 - berries macerate alone

Frozen berries will take a while to defrost, and I want them fluid enough to pour them over the bochet honey. So I dumped them into the bucket to start warming up and sealed it up.

05/03/2021 - bochet, mix, pitch

I bochet'd the honey and let it cool down quite a bit - but not enough to harden, which I'm told can happen even though I've never seen it at-scale - before dumping the fruit out onto the honey. Since the entire batch is <5 gal and the brew kettle I used for the bochet is 5 gallons, I was able to do this without overloading the kettle.

The hot honey and residual heat still hiding in the kettle / stovetop ended warming the must over 80F while I was mixing it all together, so this was going to need to be pitched - at least, in my opinion. I don't like to risk letting musts sit to macerate when they're warm enough to ferment unless I use something like campden to protect them, but Cory doesn't sulfite his fruit bombs, so my strategy so far has been to just pitch when it's warm enough.

As a result, this prompted me to add my pectic enzyme, and start rehydrating my yeast so I'd be ready to pitch an hour after the pectic enzyme went in.

05/04/2021 - punch cap, nutrients #1

Fermaid K: 3.88g
DAP: 6.35g

05/05/2021 - punch cap, nutrients #2

Fermaid K: 3.88g
DAP: 6.35g

05/04/2021 - punch cap, nutrients #1

Fermaid K: 3.88g
DAP: 6.35g

I'm not going to do entries every time in the log, but I'll punching fruit cap for the rest of the first week after this.

05/31/2021 - 4 weeks mark

Rough racked

07/18/2021 - racked

I racked this again to get it off of the fruit sediment that falls out after a while in meads like this. I lost more product to this than I was expecting, unfortunately, but we still have about 3 gallons.

I also did a small bench trial to test out adding fortified cold brew cacao, but I could not get the chocolate flavors to come through before I had added so much fortified cacao brew as to destructively water down the fruit flavors and aromas in the sample. This method won't work, at least not on this mead. If I'm going to get chocolate in this one, I'll have to make another attempt at adding cacao nibs directly to the mead, like I did with 1 gallon of the 10-05-2020 Cherry Bomb. I'm a little nervous about that, since I couldn't quite get it to come out right on that mead, but I think this one deserves an attempt at chocolate. It's still a predominantly raspberry flavor, and I think a toasty raspberry chocolate mead could really work out well.

07/20/2021 - cocoa nibs

1 lb cocoa nibs added. This brand actually calls them cocoa instead of cacao. Go figure. It also smells very strongly of chocolate, which I didn't feel was quite as much the case with the Mindo brand. I may stick to these going forward.

07/22/2021 - racked off nibs

I double-checked, and Cory said he usually does 5-7 days at 4 oz nibs per gal mead. I'm at ~5.3oz/gal here, so I ended up racking here on the third day. It's in a pretty good spot, I think - roommate likes it where it is and suggested I rack. I was still a little worried about racking too soon, but I'm going out of town tomorrow and I definitely think it would've been over-extracted by the time I got back to this mead if I didn't rack today. And my roomie is right, it's got a significant chocolate aroma for sure and the chocolate also shows up in the first part of the palate.

I also decided to backsweeten this, and bench trialed OB, clover, and pumpkin blossom honey. OB noticeably performed the best, so I added 2 lbs of it when I racked. This was me trying to sweeten to taste rather than picking measurements like I sometimes do - and it apparently pulled my gravity all the way up to 1.098, which is kind of insanely high for a final gravity... we'll see if I overdid it.

But frankly, it doesn't taste overdone. It's still noticeably acidic and tart.

I tried to filter, with the original intent being to filter all the way down to the sterile pads so the honey doesn't restart fermentation. But that failed miserably and the pads started leaking almost immediately again, like they did on the Blueberry Carrot Bomb a few days prior. I used k-meta solution to sanitize the pads this time instead of star san, so maybe that wasn't the problem last time? I've never had this much trouble with the mini-jet before, it's a little disappointing.

05/07/2022 - gravity??

I realized I don't have a FG measurement on record for this before 2 lbs of OB honey was added to sweeten. I tried to subtract 2 lbs honey worth of gravity points to calculate what my FG would have been before sweetening but I'm getting mixed results.

If I'm doing the math correctly, my FG before sweetening would've been 1.0795. Which probably would have read on a homebrew hydrometer as 1.080. I've tried to double-check the methodology I used to calculate this on Discord and so far nobody has seen an issue with it.

The math seems right to me as best I know, but the results are a little alarming because expected FG was 1.052. If this only fermented to about 1.080, then ABV is only 10.62%, which is, though still roughly wine-strength, a good bit lower than expected. This may not age quite as well as I'd hoped at such a low ABV.

Perhaps next time I will need to review my process. Maybe step-feeding or something would help this ferment better. I may also see if I can get in touch with a lab friend for alcolizer analysis, as this doesn't really taste to me like it's only 10.62% - taste is obviously not a strong enough indicator to adjust the numbers, it just makes me want to double-check my math. My concern here is that perhaps the fruit was extra sugary or something, there's a lot of estimates coming into play even when I use the calculator.

06/08/2022 - pepper goes in

Added 1 tsp freshly ground black peppercorns in a tea bag.

06/13/2022 - pepper comes out, brown sugar goes in, addressing headspace

Removed pepper. As with the Blueberry Bomb, this mead could handle more pepper, but that's not really the point, and I want to be careful not to overdo it. I've read pepper goes from OK to insane very quickly and I'd rather have it be a solid member of the supporting cast than a screenhog of a superstar.

My partner identified brown sugar as a good way to backsweeten this while highlighting the bochet flavors. I was nervous at first because my math suggests this was already sitting at 1.098 FG, but we went for it and it was absolutely the right call. I'm uncertain whether I had some math issues with my gravity or if this is just so incredibly acidic it can actually support an FG that's now likely in excess of 1.100, but there's no denying it tastes great now. We ended up adding 4 cups of brown sugar.

Additionally, so much taste testing and bench trialing had been done by now (and in addition the headspace didn't start out super tight) that I decided it was time to top off. The original plan was to use my OB Traditional in an attempt to fill headspace with a fairly neutral product that still carried good honey flavor... but my remaining bottles of it had somehow gone bad. My best guess is that fermentation had somehow restarted - I thought my filter pass on this mead was sterile, but perhaps not. And it did stall out, and we had just been hit with some hot days here...

In any case, in lieu of my neutral traditional addition, we ended up filling the headspace with something my partner brewed - a spiced cyser ('Cyd') featuring clove and cinnamon, among a small plethora of less prominent supporting ingredients.

Unlike the traditional which had been selected specifically for its expected neutrality, Cyd was selected because my partner identified his flavor profile as a good way to support the main brew. We ended up adding three 12 oz bottles to the ~3 gallon batch, and in such a minority volume Cyd wouldn't be able to dilute or detract from any of the desirable components of the main brew, but could help add complexity and round off some of the harsher edges.

Combined with the pepper and brown sugar, this brew ascended. While the prominent raspberry chocolate flavors and aromas have always been excellent, the brew has also suffered from astringent notes and a generally harsh/aggressive back-half of the tasting experience, likely in part due to the acidity of the fruit bomb, in part due to the alcohol and bochet still being fairly young Our efforts to polish and balance this brew successfully addressed these issues, and it was amazing to see how the latter-half of the tasting experience was suddenly a full range of bochet flavors instead of an astringent razor's edge.

10/25/2023 - bottled

Bottled this today, and ran it through #2 filter pads on the way to the bottle to clean it up a little. It's still incredibly thick with some crazy legs on it, but I actually managed to bottle the whole thing without the filter pads giving out. Ended up with one bottle shy of two cases worth of 375 mL bellissima bottles - not too shabby!

We did bottling day taste this one, and it's great. It's a little intense still, very hefty mouthfeel, and drinks a little more like a bourbon barrel aged beer. It doesn't have quite the same flavor profile, but it has kind of the spirit of the experience down - which might not make any sense, but it's the best description I can come up with, hah.

At nearly 2.5 years old, I do kinda feel like this mead ended up being another point in favor of not actually going relentlessly dark with our bochets. When I started brewing the conventional wisdom I saw repeated all the time was "don't be afraid to go super dark!" and I just don't think that's true. Caramelization is awesome. Burnt is burnt.

Luckily, I didn't go full burnout with this, so a little bit of dilution (when we added the Cyser to backfill headspace, see 06/13/2022 entry), a LOT of other strong flavors (this is a no-water mead!!!), and quite a bit of aging was all ultimately able to take the edge off what was initially a very harsh and aggressive flavor profile and turn it into something mature, rounded, complex, and enjoyable.

Nonetheless, I would absolutely go lighter on the bochet if I could do it again. And maybe I will - this one is mostly a Costco mead, which is a very affordable way to make a no-water mead! I think with a lighter bochet, perhaps fewer other ingredients would be necessary, and significantly less age.

Retrospective

Process Improvement

Might need somebody to hold the bucket when I go to dump the fruit in next time...
I might try to step this batch size up one more bag of fruit next time, as the yield was a little too far short of the 3 gal mark for my taste. I try to keep headspace better (although it ended up not really mattering in the end even though this wasn't bottled for 2.5 years or so; maybe it's not a big deal!).

Recipe Improvements

Lighter bochet next time

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