The Great Mead Project

The small batch was pretty low gravity and only needed a couple days to ferment out. It mostly tastes like a hopped sugar wash. Which is actually a decent result - at least I know the malted popcorn and process I'm trying to implement here doesn't create horrible off-flavors. But I'll have to crank the settings up a bit if I want to get any flavor out of this.

Batch 2 definitely had too much burned flavor from the bag-burn incident. I took it to completion and bottled some to test my idea of using the mango smoothie mixture as priming sugar and pasteurizing... didn't like the result though. It didn't carbonate well, and the mango addition was so thick it didn't taste alike a remotely alcoholic beverage, let alone a beer. The beverage just tasted like badly torched mango.

So after another round of attempting to malt popcorn, I was ready to try again with some modifications. But this time the malted popcorn smelled off. I think it may have molded or something like that. Rather than risk it, I followed the important advice to never save moldy homebrew and tossed it out.

Unfortunately, I was running out of time to hit the original project deadline, and didn't have weeks to spent malting another round of popcorn. So instead, I tried soaking coarsely ground popcorn (unmalted) in pineapple juice - the idea being, the bromelain in the pineapple juice would break the popcorn starch down into fermentable sugars. And this time around, since I was too close to the deadline for another test batch, I verified the conversion of starch to sugars using iodine - which turns dark blue or black in the presence of starches.

Boiling the corn should also work as a starch conversion method, but I wanted to do something that allowed me to at least kind of verify I had gotten fermentable sugar out of the corn before the mash, as at that point, it would no longer be isolated from other ingredients for testing - and my initial test batch relied on a boil, yet yielded no fermentable sugars. I probably did something wrong with that mash, but since I hadn't figured it out yet, I wasn't inclined to rely on it working correctly this time.

After about 2 hours soaking in pineapple juice, the iodine I added to a sample already appeared brown-orange, so as best I could tell, we had sugar! I dumped that pineapple-corn mixture into the brew bag along with the wheat when it was time for the mash and went from there.

Because the mango puree in secondary didn't work very well on the previous test batch, I decided to dump the mango puree directly into primary this time around.

This poor braggot wasn't clearing very quickly, and from all the time I spent trying to get malted popcorn to work, I was running out of time to hit our group's initial deadline. So I decided to put this through a rough filter pass - and only the rough pass, because it's going to be bottle-carbonated so it won't be crystal clear anyway - before bottling. After that, I bottled

Some out of town friends visited and tried the braggot today. I didn't bother having them try the tajin or chamoy, since the initial tasting very strongly did not favor those additions. But the base braggot again received a glowing review!

I'm a little disappointed I didn't get the pepper in more successfully, since that was part of the challenge. But at the end of the day I made 3 gallons of this, and if I'm being honest I'll going to end up serving it the way my friends enjoy it - after all, is that not why we homebrew? To share something enjoyable with our friends and family?