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For the second year of the Great Mead Project, my partner and I decided to collaborate! The challenge ingredients are rose, lavender, and vanilla.
We ended up doing two batches (in part so we have a backup if one fails) - this brew is predominantly my brainchild, complete with the modern methodologies I enjoy. I had already been eyeing rhodomel recipes by balathustrius and stormbeforedawn - my recipe is largely a combination of those two existing rhodomel recipes with lavender and vanilla to be added.
Recipe
Recipe
Primary
Primary
5 oz rose petals
3 lbs Christmas berry honey
0.5 lbs clover honey
1 stick cinnamon
0.6 oz czech saaz hops
1 peeled lemon
1 packet Lalvin 71B
Secondary
Secondary
Lavender
Vanilla
2 oz ginger
1 stick cinnamon
Gravity & ABV
Gravity & ABV
OG: ~1.090
Target FG: ~1.000
Projected ABV: ~12%
Nutrients
Nutrients
GoFerm by package instructions
7.8g baked yeast (alternatively, 2.6g Fermaid O) *
2.8g Fermaid K
2g DAP
Notes
Notes
Rose and lavender were both collected fresh from the plants around our house. Lavender was dried at room temperature. Rose was dried in the oven to sight and feel - we started at 200F and upped it to 250F after a while. Just kept checking in on the petals until they were dry.
The christmas berry honey was a birthday gift from my partner last year! It came in a series of 3 lb containers, and we needed 3.5 lbs for this batch, so I topped off with some clover honey.
I originally wanted to try brewing balathustrius' recipe Sine Qua Non, but then rose was selected as one of the recipes for the Great Mead Project, and and that meant my rhodomel would have to include lavender and vanilla as well.
I worried those additions would make a base of Sine Qua Non cloyingly sweet, so I looked to stormbeforedawn's Rhodomel 2 from the wiki for a hops recommendation hoping it would help me better balance the flavor profile.
Only time will tell if that helped at all - but either way, I'm looking forward to trying my first hopped mead that's wine style (still and higher ABV) instead of beer style (carbonated and lower ABV).
In retrospect - I'm a little unsure if we used enough rose petals. We weighed the 5 oz with the petals fresh, they weigh less dry, and the original recipes called for dry petals.
I'm curious to see how a cinnamon stick in the hop boil will go. I would have assumed that cinnamon should go in secondary, but Storm authored the recipe that calls for it in the boil and he's very experienced so I'm down to try. I can always add more in secondary if-needed.
Timeline Pitch to Bottle
Timeline Pitch to Bottle
07/24/2022 - mix & pitch
This one was slightly tricky as it requires two infusions at different temperatures - I set up two separate 1/2 gal water in pots on the stove.
One I brought to a boil, then added the hops and cinnamon stick in a bag for 20 minutes while maintaining the boil.
The other I brought to 150-170F, then added the rose petals and steeped for 2 hours while maintaining the temperature.
Both 1/2 gal water were poured into the fermenter through a sieve. I'm not sure if this matters, but I did the boiled 1/2 gal first, which gave it the full 2 hours the second infusion was being steeped to cool down. As they cooled, I added the 3.5 lbs honey and stirred it in. I also chopped and peeled the one lemon and added that to the fermenter (I've read the rind can be quite bitter so I removed as much of it as possible).
This can be summarized fairly quickly here, but it is a several hour process total due to the rose infusion taking 2 hours to steep... but other than the above, all that's left was rehydrating the yeast and pitching.
07/25/2022 - nutrients #1
My nutrient scale has gone missing somewhere in the move and remodel, and the kitchen scales I can find only do whole grams (no portions/mg/etc). Since total nutrients are in the 2g - 7.8g range and a full first week schedule would divide those by 4 additions, accurate nutrition here will be... challenging. I'm going to have to guess a little bit, there's no two ways about it.
To mitigate this problem, I'm just going to do two feeds - one at 24 and one at 48 hours. This means fewer instances of measuring across which my margin of error can add up, and measuring larger amounts (which will be slightly easier on a scale that only does whole gram increments). And finally, I figure if I accidentally overfeed, it is better to be done early, such that the yeast have plenty of time to utilize it all. Remember - at about 9% ABV, the yeast can no longer metabolize DAP, so I'm at risk of off-flavors if I feed too much too late.
So! All told, first feed went in today:
3.9g baked yeast (~1.4g Fermaid O)
1.4g Fermaid K
1g DAP
07/25/2022 - nutrients #2
Still no nutrient scale but did my best:
3.9g baked yeast (~1.4g Fermaid O)
1.4g Fermaid K
1g DAP
08/17/2022 - SG
I was expecting to rack today, but we're reading about 1.005 and I can see active bubbling in the sample I pulled to measure. It should still be fermenting since it's not dry yet and we're only aiming for 12% ABV on a 14% yeast (that almost always goes over on me). The bubbles give me hope that we aren't stalled out, and I know that pulling it off the lees while it's still fermenting can contribute to stalls so I certainly don't want to make it any worse.
Going to leave it be for now and check back in - oh, I don't know, maybe another week or so? I'm hesitant to leave a hopped mead in a bucket too long due to oxygen exposure, but the process of checking also introduces oxygen, so perhaps it is best given a wide berth.
The good news is 1.005 is most of the way there, at 11.36% ABV - and with a lot of bubbles actively coming out of solution, we could easily be even closer than the hydrometer reads. The only issue a stall might cause this close to the target final gravity is that filtering the product could be more challenging given that it isn't clearing naturally very well (and a cloudy mead clogs the filter pads).
09/02/2022 - Racked and filtered
Went ahead and racked/filtered today, then took gravity at the end of the process hoping that the filtering process would degas enough to get an accurate reading.
Filtered through #2 pads once and then #3 pads twice - apparently I'm out of #1s but luckily the batch is small and clear enough that I got away with it. Probably don't technically need to double-filter at #3, but since I anticipate needing to backsweeten and want to rely on the sterile filtering process to do that, and the filter pads are rated for 5 gallons and this is a ~1.5 gallon batch, I figured, what the heck, why not.
It looks beautiful, and darker than I expected. My yield even after 3 filter passes was probably around 1.25 gal, which is nice. I kept some in two mason jars - both has about 1/8 gal - so I have a little to experiment with when trying to figure out how to add the other ingredients. One of those mason jars was given about 1/4 of a cinnamon stick right off the bat, since that's an intended ingredient and I want to see how it plays with the current flavor profile.
I also taste-tested and it's decent so far, seems like a great starting place! Dry as a bone, in spite of still reading ~1.005. I don't know that I pick up much of the rose in an identifiable sense, but it does have markedly more complexity than comparable traditional meads, and I don't think that's just the honey varietal. I tried adding a little cinnamon and some clover honey to my taste sample and it filled out the body a lot - clover's probably not the right way to go with this, that's just what was in the cabinet and easy to throw in for today's preliminary testing.
09/03/2022 - Testing samples
This morning I added 2 sprigs of lavender blossoms (stripped from the main stem) to the mason jar the received a quarter of a cinnamon stick yesterday and gave it a taste in the mid-afternoon.
It tastes much better than it did straight of the carboy! Very metheglin-y, which hopefully makes sense if you messed with floral metheglins before - probably a little too much in that direction, but it is hard to dose small samples of mead with adjuncts like cinnamon and lavender. Luckily, it is not tasting like soap, which I hear can happen with too much lavender.
I am a little worried vanilla may end up making the mead cloying. I was originally going to backsweeten this, but now I am thinking since lavender and vanilla are required adjuncts for the challenge, I should add all my adjuncts first and sweeten later as part of final balancing if there is still room and need for it. There may not be, if we're already trying to avoid a cloying taste, adding honey may not help. We'll see what happens with further testing.
09/19/2022 - Ginger and cinnamon added to secondary
I'm going to need more bench trialing to figure out how much lavender and vanilla to add here but I decided I do want to go ahead with the cinnamon and ginger additions the original recipe I used as sort of a template called for.
Ginger skin was peeled off then it was chopped up, the cinnamon stick just went straight in.
10/05/2022 - Taste test for ginger and cinnamon
Ginger is fairly forward now and the brew overall is fairly bitter - but that is just what I was hoping for at this point! Only time will tell if my plan works, but I know I still need to backsweeten and introduce the challenge adjuncts vanilla and lavender. I wanted this to be a little bitter in the hopes of avoiding becoming cloying with all the sweet and floral ingredients still to incorporate.
The complexity here is also great already, I think we've already got red wine levels of complexity (though of course the flavors are very different). I am a little worried the other flavors will throw the balance off - if this doesn't turn out great with vanilla and lavender I may try again without them because I think what I have right now is a good base to build off of (I'm just not sure the ingredients I have to use for the challenge are necessarily going to be the best ones to add here).
We'll see! But so far, so good!
12/06/2022 - Racked off the ginger
Ok wow, in retrospect and based on the last taste testing, it might have been a good idea to rack off the ginger sooner. Busy life nonsense, though - sometimes that happens to mead, and you gotta roll with it best you can. It's part of why I don't do more beer - mead is more likely to be ok with being abandoned for two months. Onward and upward!
12/16/2022 - Lavender and vanilla added
Managed to get the lavender and vanilla in today. Added 2 tbsp dry lavender blossoms and 1 vanilla bean, split open. Both are in a little reusable tea bag for slightly easier removal later.
01/04/2023 - Bottled
Tasting notes are currently not published here because the YouTube video is about to be published, but maybe I'll come back and update this with a written version later. Haha!
Retrospective
Retrospective
Process Improvement
Process Improvement
Recipe Improvements
Recipe Improvements
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