Friday, March 06, 2009

Brew #70: Raspberry Melomel

I have been planning to make a mead for a long time, and have had 4 kgs of Argentinian honey lying around for almost a year, and I have now finally done something with it.

It went pretty well, but I made a couple of mistakes along the way. First I miscalculated the final volume. Originally I had aimed for 13 liters of water and honey, but ended up with 18 liters (21 liters after adding the raspberry). I also ended up fermenting the mead a too little cold and the sweet mead yeast crapped out at 1.060 (I suspect because of the pH level), so I had to add some really old Lalvin D-47 from 2005(!). That boosted the fermentation, and it went down to 1.008 just a couple of days later.

The melomel is now in the secondary, but I'll keg it soon. From the samples I've had so far it is promising, and I'm sure I'll try making more meads in the future. I plan to serve it not carbonated.

The batch was brewed 2009-02-06.

Style:
Raspberry Melomel
Type:
21 liters. No heat.
Ingredients:
4200g Argentinian honey
500g Norwegian Raspberry honey
2840g Red Raspberry puree, Oregon
1.5ts Fermaid K (day 0)
1ts Fermaid K (day 2)
1ts Fermaid K (day 5)
Yeast:
2 packs Wyeast 4184 Sweet Mead, and 2 packs of Lalvin D-47 after a few days
Boil:
180 min
Fermentation:
17 C and 22 C

OG: 1.085 FG: 1.006 abv: 9.0% (estimated)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Sounds like a great summer brew!

Glass Bottles said...

Wow... This sounds amazing. I wish you'd come back and give us all sorts of new ideas!