Pumpkin Blossom Mead

** Per Chef's experiment on the effectiveness of homemade FermO (baked/boiled yeast) - which is what I actually have - I am erring on the safe side and using 3x the professional grade amount. It seems like most folks with a full nutrient schedule have FermO, so I put that number in the recipe for ease of reference.

Notes

This one started off just wanting to use a weird varietal and finding that Flying Bee Ranch had pumpkin blossom honey in stock at a decent price.

My original intent was to go for pumpkin pie style spices to make this a metheglin, but the varietal ended up tasting very grassy. I did not think pumpkin pie spices would match well with the base flavors of the unmodified traditional, and instead opted to try oaking the mead. I had not used much direct oaking before and it seemed like a good time to try using some of the oak chip samples I had in stock.

I'm not sure if I would recommend pumpkin blossom honey to anybody else for mead purposes... I have probably 14lbs left after this batch I may use just to see what I can do with it, but I ended up letting this get to be almost 3 years old before I decided to put oak chips on it because it just tasted horrible for a while. It was "like a cup of lawn mower clippings" it was so grassy when I first racked it, and that ~3 years of aging has given me hope it might become a decent drinkable mead still, but... by my standards today, a mead shouldn't need to be 3 years old to be drinkable. To the contrary, many meads are past their prime by 3 years of age, and especially for one like this that ran on ale yeast, something seems to have gone wrong for it to take this long to taste good. Perhaps there was a mistake I didn't catch in primary, or perhaps it's just this is a weird varietal not well-suited to my mead palate.

Timeline Pitch to Bottle

08/13/2021 - mix & pitch

Why on earth did I make a mead on Friday the 13th

08/14/2021 - nutrients 1

Just going with 24h and 48h additions on this one to make sure I don't put nutes in too late. Ferm K + DAP today.

08/15/2021 - nutrients 2

Fermaid O

08/26/2021 - SG

SG: 1.010
ABV: 13.26%

This is probably done fermenting based on US-05's on-paper 12% ABV tolerance but it's better practice to wait at least 3 days (ideally more like a week) in between readings to verify gravity has actually stopped dropping before racking. In this case I wouldn't have an issue with racking but I ran out of time to do the racking today haha.

09/07/2021 - racking

Wasn't very clear, curiously - flocculation wasn't great - but racked it today. Might have waited longer to rack for it to clear more but this perfectly filled up the 3 gallon carboy right to the bottom fo the neck which is very nice for longer-term headspace management.

Unknown Date Circa 2022

I forget when exactly it was that I tasted this but when I did, the taste was pretty awful. The pumpkin blossom came out very grassy and with nothing else in this mead at the time, it was like a cup full of lawn mower clippings. We were collectively not certain this would ever become a drinkable mead and thought it might need to be dumped. But by this point I was running out of active meads and not likely to be starting a new mead any time soon either so I figured I might as well see if the "age heals all brews" philosophy would ever manage to salvage this one. I've learned on other meads that if the underlying base flavor is bad sometimes not even age can fix it, but I didn't have any prior experience with this heavy grass flavor and wasn't sure how it would age.

07/29/2024 - tasting and oak chips

I tasted today for the first time in likely 2 years, and the mead itself is just barely shy of 3 years old at this point. It's actually decent!

Age has certainly helped it here. It's smooth, and very honey-forward, although it is still that decidedly grassy pumpkin blossom honey flavor, it's at least "slightly grassy" now and not so much "cup full of lawn mower clippings" like it was a couple years ago. It is also a little flat, though that's not particularly surprising as it is ultimately a traditional mead with no acid/tannin balancing yet.

I suspected it needed tanin, and couldn't find my cocktail bitters for bench trialing. I gave the small taste I'd pulled a dash of citrus juice to see the effect of acid, thinking if it was very obviously terrible that would be confirmation enough for me that tannins were the way to go. Sure enough, with citrus added it was awful! Haha.

Although I had originally planned this as a "pumpkin pie" mead, I didn't think the grassy flavors of this honey varietal were going to work alongside pumpkin pie spices. Instead, I pivoted to oak, and decided to break out some of the oak chips I'd received when a friend was working for a winery supplier.

After a little bit of research, it seemed like people were suggesting 2.6g of oak chips per liter of mead, and I had about a 3 gallon batch on hand, which would require approximately 29.5g. The oak chip sample packs I had were labeled 30g, which I figured was close enough.

The spec sheet for the specific oak chips I used - Laffort's Nobile Intense chips - suggested dosages of 0.5g - 5g per liter of mead, so 2.6g seems perfectly reasonable as that's right about smack in the middle.

I weighed the bag before and after adding the oak chips and found the 30g must have been the total package weight, not just the chips. By my calculations, I added about 26.3g of oak chips to this mead, which is slightly less than the target amount. However, I've also read a lot of complaints about oak chips, including that they often extract flavor too quickly, so I'm not sad about going slightly under. We're close enough to the target that I figure I can just leave the chips on a little longer if-needed.

I'm anticipating leaving the oak chips on for about a week. Some people oak longer for sure, but I again notice I'm reading a lot of negative comments about the flavors from oak chips (as opposed to spirals, cubes, etc), so I would rather this come out lightly oaked and then add something like powdered tannins to finish the balancing job if-needed than over-oak and have it come out excessively harsh.

The Nobile Intense chips I used here are a dark "chocolate" color, with spec sheet listing their scent as toasted almond, roasted coffee, cocoa, and caramel. Dark chips felt intuitively appropriate given the darker color of this honey varietal, but we'll see how it goes!

08/13/2024 - sage

I added an entire container of rubbed sage today - about 17g. It will only sit for about a day on this much sage but it should start to help pull this toward a kind of Thanksgiving mead!

08/14/2024 - rack filter and blend

Today I racked the mead alongside the 08-17-2021 Double Clover Trad batch and blended them together as I filtered them down to the sterile filter pads. I did three total filter passes - one through the fine pads and two passes through two sets of sterile pads (last time I tried to sterile filter stabilize it didn't stabilize).

After all the bench trials I wasn't going to be able to fill a 3 gallon carboy after filter losses, and I also wanted to lighten this mead up a fair bit. The pumpkin blossom was still stronger than I wanted it to be and I thought it would be a nice way to kind of calm it down and to also top off my head space.

I ended up with a very full 3 gallon carboy and 3 mason jars - it didn't all fit. I'm totally OK with that though; the mason jars will be used for further bench trialing as we finish this the rest of the way!

There is currently nothing on the mead, racking and filtering got us off both the oak chips and the sage I added the day prior. It probably needs a little more of something but we'll have to do some bench trialing to figure that out.

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