Cherry Mead - Black Lapin Cherry and Sour Cherry

With the summer here and a wicked deal on Cherries at one of the local produce stores I figured what better time to work on some Cherry Wine. It didn't hurt that the wife is away at some silly scrapbooking retreat. It's 20 minutes away, how can they call it a retreat.... retreat from the wallet maybe.

Anyways, I popped a few percacet last night and went to work at pitting 17 pounds of Cherries. Yes, you heard right, 17 pounds. From there, I tossed the now seedless cherries into the freezer for the night. The theory being, the freezing of the fruit makes the juice or sugar molecules 'splode. I read it on that thar Internet... so it must be true.

Today I took them out of the freezer and tossed them, 4 pounds at a time, into my favorite little steam juice extractor. I can't say enough about this thing, clear juice with very little mess.

Since I only had just over 13 pounds of cherries after the removal of the pits, I didn't have quite the pre-requisite 8 litres I usually like to start with. Luckily, I had some frozen cherry juice I saved from last year. That combined with about 5 cups of sour cherry drippings from a different harvest last year made for a very sweet juice indeed. When I measured the SG (Prior to adding sugar) it was sitting at 1.060. Chit, that is sweeter than the previous batch of Rasberry Mead - Pulque. I added 2 teaspoons of citic acid, for good measure. So now I am ready to make the Cherry juice a little sweeter (maybe around 1.080)

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So here is the recipe

Cherry Mead

1 litre Sour cherry Juice
7 litres Lapin or black cherry juice
2 Teaspoons Citric Acid
2 1/2 cups Honey
1 pack 1118 yeast
1/2 teaspoon energizer

Note: I did take out about 4 cups of sweetened cherry juice (Pre Yeast) to bring the level in the jar down. The reason being, with the last batch I did, the juice was too high and it ended up overflowing. Once the fermentation starts to stabilize, I plan on adding the juice back in.

Specific gravity 1.080 on the button

Inoculated at 10 PM on Friday August 6, 2010

Additional note regarding left over cherries.

When you consider the cost of Cherries and the amount of juice required for making Cherry Wine it may seem a little expensive. However, the cherries left over when de-juicing them with a Steam juice extractor are not gone. There is plenty of flavour left over in the cherries and they can be used for pies, jams or simply eaten on their own with a little cottage cheese or ice cream. I have 5 pounds of cherries left over from the original 13 pounds. Some will be frozen some will be canned and the rest eaten as is.

You can also use the left over cherries in breads and cakes. mmmmm yummy