They just had a sale on Strawberries at the Local Grocery store. Although I typically prefer local BC Grown Strawberries over the California counterparts, I did manage to find some very sweet smelling large deep red berries in the pile. I immediately grabbed 8 Pounds of them.
Awhile back, I also stumbled across a booth selling organic Honey and picked up a couple of pails of Unpastuerized mountain wild flower Honey. It is a beautifully thick and deep yellow honey with a sweeter and richer taste than the Clover Honey I usually use.
So now that I have given you the history of the ingredients in this batch of Strawberry Mead, let's move onto making Mead.
I cleaned and weighed out the strawberries and put them in a large stainless steel pot with 1.5 Litres of Spring water and the Citric Acid & Honey. while heating up the mixture, I crushed the strawberries with a hand crusher thingy (Sort of like a pastry cutter.) All the recipe's I found said to hand crush, I am assuming this is to keep the must chunky. Heating the mixture up, just to disolve the honey I then transfered the must to my 2 Gallon primary fermenter and added water to bring the level up.
I then checked the Specific Gravity and found it to be right around 1.091 which would bring the Mead to a 12% Alc level if left to ferment to dry.
I prepared and dumped in 2 packages of Lalvin K1-V116 Yeast, which I'm told is a Mead Yeast and let it sit on my fridge (Nice and warm.)
I did not have any yeast nutrient left, so I figured I would try it au-natural...well sort of.
Ingredients:
6 lbs strawberries
4 Tsp Citric Acid
4.5 litres water
7 cups unpasteurized wild mountain honey
spec gravity
1.091
1 Package of Lalvin K1-V1116
The Must was innoculated at 5PM PST on April 29th, 2008
See ya in a few days.
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OK, today is May 5th and I stopped the fermentation around 5:30 PM PST. So that would be a record of 6 days for primary fermentation. I noticed the Mead Yeast was quite abit different than the Champagne yeast in that it foamed more than it bubbled.
ReplyDeleteI ran into abit of an issue a few hours into fermentation where the bubbles were overflowing the jar. Part of the problem was I overfilled my jar, the second was, I really did not need the second package of yeast.
I noticed the fermentation start to really slow down towards the end, in fact I'm pretty sure it would have stopped on its' own had I just left it.
Regardless, the Specific Gravity prior to Pastuerization was 1.038. This would give me about a 9% Alc Mead.
As per normal, I heated the Mead up to 160F then I turned the heat down and put the lids on the pots. I let them sit for 10 mintes, checking the temperature and stirring every once in awhile. Once the 10 minutes were up I Poured one of the pots back into my primary (Filtering through a Sieve.) Since there was alot of alcohol evaporation, I let the bigger pot sit with the lid on so it could cool down abit before I dumped it in the jar.
I bottled half of this batch right around Canadian Thanksgiving (Sorry not patriotic enough to even remember when that is)
ReplyDeleteIt was really quite nice. There was a definate aroma and taste of strawberry but yet you could still taste the alcohol without a burn. I would have to say, this is the best batch of them all.