Making Mead - Part Two

In my prior post, I talked about the two primary facets of meadmaking that I think contribute the most to making a good-tasting mead: yeast health and suitable honey. Of course, sanitation and proper care go without saying. This post gets into the pre-fermentation details. Most of this information is a result of attending NHC sessions last year, reading Ken Schramm's book, and going through Kris England & Curt Stock's presentation from the 2008 NHC.

A couple of weekends ago, John and I threw together three batches of mead in one afternoon – two fruit meads (melomels) and one traditional. It's so easy to put together, it's almost silly to do just one batch at a time. The most frustrating and time-consuming part of that day’s session was that our honey was fully crystalized and it took about 2 hours – and a lot of boiling-hot water – to get it to a pourable consistency (and even then, “pourable” is an overstatement; it was more like “soft enough to squeeze through the narrow neck of a gallon jug”). It’s worth noting that Tupelo & White Sage won’t likely crystalize at room temperature; in my experience (and I’m not alone), tupelo makes better-tasting mead than white sage, but sage can be a great base for fruit & spice meads as it’s quite neutral.

Weighing the honey on a postal scale
I had added a gallon of water to the carboy prior to adding honey
(the rest of the water got added once I finished with all the honey)

First, Devise a Recipe

I like using the mead calculator on GotMead.com. You can determine how much honey, juice, fruit, water, and other ingredients you need to achieve your desired mead. By playing around with quantity of honey & other fermentables while keeping the target volume the same, I can come up with amounts of ingredients to achieve my desired starting gravity. 

To know where your starting gravities should land, you can look at the BJCP’s guidelines for hydromel (light), standard, and sack (strong) meads. For instance, for the pyment I knew I wanted a mead that would be at the upper end of the standard-strength range (around 14% ABV). To know how much honey to use with 4 pounds of grape concentrate (which I know is 68 Brix), I added this in the calculator as a 2nd ingredient with 68% sugar content. With 12 pounds of honey, this brought me to just under the top of the standard category. Perfect! 

I'll pick two of the three recipes we did - one melomel (the pyment) and one traditional. Both are 5-gallon batches.

Step 1: Prepare the Ingredients

For the Traditional Mead (OG 1.115):

16 pounds of Orange Blossom honey

4 gallons of drinking water from Hy-Vee

1 tsp of Calcium Chloride to provide calcium to the must & aid fermentation

4.5g of Fermaid-K for yeast nutrition

2g of DAP as a source of nitrogen

For the pyment (melomel made with grapes) (OG 1.111):

12 pounds of Orange Blossom honey

4 pounds of Beaujolais grape concentrate (Alexander's brand, 68 Brix)

4 gallons of drinking water from Hy-Vee

1 tsp of Calcium Chloride to provide calcium to the must & aid fermentation

4.5g of Fermaid-K for yeast nutrition

2g of DAP as a source of nitrogen

Step 2:  Assemble the must

Put the water and any juices & herbs into the fermenter, then add your honey. The easiest way to measure your honey is by weight – we put our carboy on a postal scale then pour the honey into the carboy until the desired weight is achieved. Once all ingredients are in there (except for maybe a gallon or two of water), you get to the fun part:  mixing.

Before mixing

I don’t recommend doing this without a lees stirrer. I’ve done it a few times without one, and can’t believe it took me 3 batches to finally pick one up. Stirring honey into water by hand is not fun. So, do yourself a favor and get one (and a drill if you don’t have one already).

The business end of a lees stirrer
The little "wings" fan out when the stirrer is in rotation.

The wand end of the lees stirrer just goes right into your drill – sanitize it, hook it up to your drill, put it into your fermenter, and whirr away. Be careful not to scratch the bottom or sides of your plastic container. In a few minutes, your honey should be completely blended into the honey. Add the Calcium Chloride, DAP, and Fermaid-K, mix lightly, then cover your fermenter (with foil, a cap, or a lid) and go prepare your yeast.

After mixing

Step 3:  Prepare your yeast

If you’re using dry yeast, you need to rehydrate it. Sprinkling it directly onto the must can cause slow fermentation because you can end up with clumped-up yeast cells, preventing all of the cells from rehydrating and contributing to fermentation. Rehydrating with Go-Ferm will kick-start your fermentation by providing your yeasties with nutrients while they go back to their full & proper shape. Obviously, if you’re using liquid yeast, skip this step.

Fermaid-K, DAP, and Go-Ferm for happy yeast
You'll need a lot of this.

Boil some water and pour it into small containers (we use small coffee mugs, but any small container will do). You don’t need a lot of water – maybe 2/3 of a cup at most. Cover the small containers with foil and let them cool to 115 degrees (be sure to sanitize your thermometer every time you check the water temp). Once you get to 115F, add the Go-Ferm. Cover your containers again and let the Go-Ferm sit in the water while it continutes to cool to about 105F. Once you hit 105, add the yeast and let it rehydrate for about 15-30 minutes. After that time has passed (or if you’re using liquid yeast), pitch your yeast, hook up a sanitized blow-off assembly, place your fermenter in a dark place that’s about 68-72F, and you’re done!

Until tomorrow…

reference - Part One

Making Mead - Part One

I first wrote about mead a while back (wow, was it really 2 summers ago?) and have continued to learn quite a bit since then. I wrote about making a basic mead, which included mixing honey, water, and nutrients over 3 days ("staggered nutrient additions"). Since then, we've learned a few more details to help make even better mead. In short:

- Yeast health is key
- Your choice of honey matters
- Did I mention yeast health?

Making mead, as mentioned, is essentially mixing honey & water together, then pitching yeast and letting fermentation take its course. No boiling is needed (though some people do boil the must), so preparation is extremely simple. Getting the honey & water mixed together is the hardest part of "brew day". But really the difficulty comes into play once the yeast is pitched.

Yeast Health
Honey is extremely nutrient-poor, so yeast struggles to ferment the sugars. Additionally, FAN (Free Amino Nitrogen) is quite low in mead must, unlike most beer wort. Meadmakers therefore need to add a source of nitrogen in addition to other yeast nutrients. Nitrogen is typically added to must in the form of Diammonium Phosphate (DAP), which is commonly available at a homebrew retailer. Other nutrients to promote yeast growth are found in nutrient blends such as Fermaid K. It's composed of fatty amino acids, vitamins like thiamin & biotin, and various minerals. Like DAP, Fermaid-K is something you can easily buy at a homebrew supply shop.

How about the yeast itself? We typically use dried yeast from Lalvin, but have used Wyeast liquid yeast as well. I really like Lalvin 71B and D-47, but I think it's important to read through a yeast's characteristics and find one that suits your goal well. Lalvin posts all their yeast profiles online. This chart will give you a good overview of the yeast characteristics.

If you are using dry yeast, use a yeast nutrient during rehydration to assist mineral & amino acid uptake. We use Lallemand's "Go-Ferm" product which is, again, available at homebrew supply retailers.

Choice of Honey
When we first started making mead, I was picking up local honey at farmers' markets. The resulting meads were good, but not as good as the ones I was tasting at competitions. I attended a mead session at NHC last year where we tasted raw honey next to resulting mead. What that made me realize was that honeys have their own unique flavors which carry over into the final product; it helped me to understand why a lot of successful meadmakers turn to tupelo and orange blossom honeys again & again.

I found a bunch of honey suppliers online (Millers, Draper Bee, Bee Folks, Northern Brewer) and ordered small containers of tupelo & orange blossom honeys from each. John and I tasted them side-by-side to determine our favorites and ordered those in bulk. I found that the Northern Brewer Orange Blossom was the best citrusy-tasting honey of our selections (we ordered 5 gallons of it), while Bee Folks had the most amazing floral Orange Blossom honey. Bee Folks' tupelo honey is wonderful and creamy and will be our choice for ordering tupelo in bulk.

Bee Folks also offers a ton of varietal honeys, many of which would be great for mead. Blueberry, almond, avocado, and even killer bee honey. I got to taste some killer bee mead at this year's Upper Mississippi Mashout and it was interesting... spicy, peppery, and not my favorite. But worth trying for sure. I can't recommend enough just buying a bunch of small containers of honey from various suppliers and finding out which ones you like best. Your mead will reflect the nuances of the honey you use, so it's incredibly important to select honey that is high quality and tastes good.

So there's your prep work and some stuff to think about. In the next post, I'll talk about actually making mead.

No Flash in the Pan

We've had a lot of west coast breweries come to town the past three years, Stone being one of the latest. Lagunitas, Moylans, Ballast Point... Deschutes will be making its arrival soon, but there's no appearance I'm looking forward to more than Green Flash - and I'm not talking about the split-second optical phenomenon. This one will hopefully be in Missouri to stay.

I'll never forget my first Green Flash Experience. I was in Richmond, VA, for work and was catching up on some workflow diagrams at the bar. It was "glass night" (buy the beer, keep the glass) for Magic Hat Lucky Kat IPA. I'd never had a Magic Hat beer at the time, and was excited to try its IPA. Ordered one up and was pleased but not thrilled about it. I do still have the glass though - a standard 16oz pint glass that pretty much sums up the beer - not bad, not exciting, and pretty much is what it's supposed to be. (I know, you're thinking, "where can I get this incredible beer??")

I wanted another IPA and was having a hard time deciding between a Moylander and something else. The bartender asked if I'd ever had the Green Flash West Coast IPA. Skeptical, I asked if it was any good. He said, "do you like hoppy?" Yes, I replied. Little did I realize he was asking, "do you like HOPPY?"

And there it appeared before me, in all its grapefruity, piney, resiny splendor, the bitter liquid from San Diego, California that encapsulates all that defines a "West Coast" IPA. Simcoe, Columbus, and Cascade are quickly becoming my favorite hop combo for IPAs. Toss some Centennial in there, and you get WCIPA. Yeah, I know it's not Pliny the Elder (not fair, that's a double IPA), but it's awfully damn close.

And, soon, much easier to get. I learned back in January that Green Flash would begin distribution to Missouri starting this coming summer. I'd say that little tidbit made my day, but I'm actually still excited about it. It made my winter, my spring, and will probably make my summer as well. They make several beers, including a Hop Head Red, which I also love, and a Belgian IPA named Le Freak. Lest you think they only do IPAs, they make several other styles including a Saison and a Belgian Strong Dark.

WCIPA is a fantastic beer that is something to experience and hold as a benchmark for others. This beer is IPA. And will be in Missouri this summer.

Specs -
95 IBUs
7% ABV
OG: 1.070ish
FG: 1.015ish

A Collaboration to make you say Dankeschön

Those of you who have ever driven into Lawrence KS probably know that it has a sister city:  Eutin, Germany (pronounced OY-tin). Eutin's in the very north of Germany, not too far south of Denmark, and is a popular tourist destinations for the Danes. Like Lawrence, it's a hilly city in the middle of flat land. Unlike Lawrence, it has a castle. We need more castles.

This weekend, Free State celebrates its sisterhood with a collaboration beer made with the brewers of Brauhaus Eutin.

We’ve teamed up with the brewers in our sister city of Eutin, Germany to brew a collaborative beer to celebrate the musical and cultural exchanges coming this summer with Lawrence and Eutin residents. On Sunday evening, April 17^th, we’ll host an entourage of Eutin guests at Free State, and celebrate the continued success of this sister city effort.  We’ll tap the first keg of Eutin St. Michaelis "Tafelbier" (unfiltered amber lager) at 7:30. Come welcome our Eutin guests!

The Eutin Brewery's Tafelbier is served at the Brauhaus Eutin under their St Michaelis brand, and is approximately 5.5% ABV. It's light, sweet, and not that hoppy in Germany; we'll see how the collaboration version compares. This is probably one of the more unique and clever collaborations I've seen recently. Unfiltered German amber lager made via a collaborative effort by Germans (who make it for a living) and one of the best breweries in the region? Yes, please.

Again, that's this Sunday (April 17th) at 7:30pm in Free State's brewpub on Mass. See you there!

The Maibocks are Coming

It's that time of year again, when the Maibocks start appearing on shelves and tap handles. We got a preview of this spring seasonal out in Lawrence, when Free State was pouring its Kansas anniversary beer, K-150. It's gone now, I believe, but hopefully you were able to get some while they had it.

Next week, Gordon Biersch will start pouring its Maibock seasonal on Wednesday at 5:30pm. It is accompanied by its Pacific Rim menu, which we also saw last year. I'm not really sure where this association between maibock and banana spring rolls comes from, but I don't go there for the food anyway. Note to American Homebrewers Association members - Gordon Biersch participates in the AHA pub discount program. Get $3 off any food order over $10 when you show your membership card.

And starting this month, we'll be seeing Boulevard's Maibock, Boss Tom, on shelves and tap handles. I really enjoyed this one last year, and look forward to it again. I was going to say that this is my favorite Boulevard seasonal in the non-smokestack lineup, but then I remembered Nutcracker. So, 2nd favorite. It's close. You can already get this on tap at Flying Saucer, and I'm sure other venues have it available as well - or will, very soon.

Some quick stats on Maibock - it's a lager in the bock family, and pale malt flavor dominates the flavor profile. You won't find the high presence of toasty malt here like you will in a traditional bock, or the rich caramelly flavors of a doppelbock. While hop flavor won't be too high, maibock definitely has more hop bitterness & spiciness than the other bocks.

OG is in the 1.060s - 1.070s with IBUs hanging out in the high 20s and low 30s. ABV should be in the mid 6% range. Clean, crisp, malty, but more bitter than the other members of the bock family, it's a great transition from the malt-dominant beers we love in winter to the hoppy, crisp, refreshing beers of summer.

Prost!

Swagger Food Pairing Dinner - This Time, with Whiskey

I know I typically talk about beer (and mead and cider) on here, but I also enjoy distilled malt beverages (especially rye) and have been keeping tabs on Swagger’s upcoming whiskey dinner. They’re partnering with Heaven Hill distilleries, which produce familiar brands like Evan Williams, Elijah Craig, and Rittenhouse Rye (mmm, manhattans...). And, which provides some of the barrels for Boulevard's barrel-aged beers.

You can read about the details on their website, but here’s a quick rundown of the dinner. It’s $50 per person, and you get:

Mid West Triple Cooked Beef Rib + Evan Williams – Single Barrel

Smoked Trout Hash + Bernheim Wheat Whiskey.

Hand Crafted Hickory Smoked Boudin Sausage + Rittenhouse Rye Bottled in Bond

Smoked Duck Breast in a Pancetta Taco Shell + Elijah Craig – 12yr.

Pecan Pie +  Cherry Manhattan (Evan Williams, Evan Williams Cherry Reserve, sweet vermouth)

The dinner will be held at Swagger (unlike their previous pairing dinner, which was held off site), and you can call them at 816-361-4388 to reserve your spot. 

National Homebrewing Competitions - AHA and Samuel Adams

Six packs of the 2010 Samuel Adams Longshot winners should be hitting KC shelves pretty soon, coinciding with a call for submissions for the 2011 contest. Last year’s competition appealed to the creativity in homebrewers, limiting entries only to BJCP category 23, “Specialty.” This category specifically targets those beers that fit into no other BJCP styles (such as American Pale Ale, Witbier, or German Pilsner).

The three winning styles were Friar Hop (Belgian IPA), Blackened Hops (Black IPA, American Black Ale, Cascadian Ale, or whatever you want to call it), and Honey B’s Lavender Wheat (Wheat ale with lavender, vanilla, and honey). You can read more about the winners and their beers on the Samuel Adams website. Or, see below if you don’t want to sign in with your birthdate information – twice.

This year’s entries are open to all 23 beer categories again, and the deadline for receipt is in early May. It’s free to enter, so why not? All the rules & regulations are posted on their website. 

Speaking of competitions, this coming Wednesday (March 30^th) is the last day to register your beers with your National Homebrewing Competition site of choice . If you haven’t registered your beers online already, you’d better do it now; nearly 2/3 of the regional sites have been filled, you're too late. With nine sites accepting 750 entries, all of them now full, we’re looking at a giant competition this year.

Even if you’re not entering any beers,the AHA National Homebrewers Conference itself is like nothing I’ve ever seen. Homebrew from dozens of clubs all over the country (mostly from the hosting region) show off brewing creativity, techniques like decoction mashing, and – as shown by the “everything is iced” booth last year – a bit of insanity. I wrote about our fun at NHC it last year. This year is in San Diego and promises to be yet another good time. 

Evening events aside, the sessions during the day are more than worth the trip. Last year we learned about cask conditioning, finally understood keeving, and gained some invaluable tips about meadmaking. We even got to taste honey & mead side-by-side to evaluate which honeys we preferred and how the final outcomes compared to their original sources. One of the most popular sessions, probably to no one’s surprise, was a discussion hosted by the Weasel Boy Brewing's owners about Going Pro. The room was absolutely packed with serious homebrewers learning what it takes to turn a hobby into a full-blown job. 

And no, we didn't attend that session.

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ABOUT THE [Longshot] WINNERS AND 2011 AMERCIAN HOMEBREW CONTEST

Richard Roper’s Friar Hop Ale combines his love of hops with his affinity for spicy Belgian ales.  To develop his recipe, Roper created a hybrid of two styles, uniting the big hoppy taste of an IPA with the spicy, fruity flavor of a Belgian. The toasty caramel sweetness from the malt and Belgian candi sugar mimics a Belgian ale, while the big citrus hop notes of an IPA balance the style. A spicy yeast fermentation and hints of orange and coriander round out the brew. Richard’s Friar Hop Ale is a refreshing beer that can be enjoyed any time of year.

Rodney Kibzey’s Blackened Hops is a perfect combination of deep roasted malt character and citrusy hop bitterness. Harnessing eight years of homebrewing knowledge, Rodney found that combining debittered dark malts and citrusy hops yielded a surprising and unique flavor for this brew. Its black color hints at roasted malt and coffee flavors, but it is the big hop character really steals the show.  Packed with citrusy and piney American hops, this beer has a big flavor and clean bitterness. This is Rodney’s second LongShot American Homebrew Contest win; he won in 2007 with a Weizenbock and his beer was included in the 2008 LongShot Variety Pack.

Caitlin DeClercq has worked as a member of the Samuel Adams sales team since 2006. She created her Honey B’s Lavender Wheat with dried lavender petals, giving it a fragrant but soft aroma.  A citrus tartness and slight sweetness from the honey and vanilla balance out the finish in this California resident’s brew; perfect to sip while kicking back and relaxing.

(copied directly from the link above)