All your basepair are belong to us » honey http://rg-d.com/BioLOG Biologging for fun and profit since 1994 Sat, 10 Sep 2011 16:56:26 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.1 en hourly 1 Mead http://rg-d.com/BioLOG/2008/03/02/mead/ http://rg-d.com/BioLOG/2008/03/02/mead/#comments Sun, 02 Mar 2008 02:31:41 +0000 kate http://rg-d.com/BioLOG/2008/03/02/mead/ There is a honey research group at USyd and who regularly have vast quantities of honey going spare. We thought that mead was a good idea…

Ingredients

  • 5 kg honey (a mixture of leptospermum, banksia and eucalyptus)
  • Zest and juice of 1 lemon and 1 lime
  • 1 tsp each of: coriander seed and cloves
  • 1 piece of liquorice bark approx. 4 cm in length
  • 3 pieces of cassia bark approx. 4 cm each in length
  • 1 black cardamom pod, split
  • 1 nutmeg freshly ground
  • 25 g Fuggles finishing hops
  • Made it up to 23 litres

We used Lanvin EC118 champagne yeast and kept the fermentor at a reasonably constant 22 °C.

Day 1: SG >1050 but we didn’t have a hygrometer capable of measuring any further at the time.

Day 49: SG 1020

Day 67: SG 0995

Day 84: Racked it off into a clean barrel and added 1 tsp finings

Day 102: SG 0993 bottled into 30 x 750 ml PET bottles – no priming involved this time.

Notes

Two months after bottling it was clear and slightly fizzy. Very dry.

The honey has given it a very strong flavour (yum) and I prefer to dilute it a bit with lemonade.

]]> http://rg-d.com/BioLOG/2008/03/02/mead/feed/ 0