Supplies arrived for Saturday brewing
04/30/2018
It's Christmas this evening at our house as I came home from work with three packages waiting for me on the walkway. After I made the Bilbemel that I started on the 22nd, I decided that it would be a good idea to get some more yeast energizer. I feed the new mead for the first three days with it just to get a good fermentation started before letting it sit and work. Some brewers say to add nutrient but I had yeast energizer on hand and found that it worked like I wanted. So, I just continued adding it and have been happy with the result so far.
The other thing that I purchased was some whole vanilla beans so that I could make my first Metheglin. This is a spiced mead with no fruit added to the brew although there are a few exceptions to this. I’ve added cinnamon to my Cyser earlier and the spice was at first a bit overwhelming but am confident it will calm down leaving the apples. I’m going to start with a clover honey about 3.5 pounds of it to make a sweet meat with a vanilla flavor to it. I’ll add the vanilla to the secondary fermentation as I normally do hoping for a final gravity around 1.020.
Finally, I needed to get some more bottles to hold all the mead that I’m making recently after Karin tasted my first Cherry Melomel. My original was to make one mead every other month which escalated to every month after the Cyser. Now, I’m making a new batch twice a month and will need to store them someplace other than the gallon jugs. I’m also planning giving some away for Christmas, the real one, to family and will lose about half a dozen in that. I want to have enough bottle remaining after the holidays to have some for me to look at and enjoy as well.
What will I be doing with the remaining vanilla beans after I’m done the Saturday? Besides the Vanilla Metheglin I’m also planning a mead that I will be calling Peaches ‘n Cream which will be a peach melomel with vanilla bean to it. I actually go the idea looking at some yarn Karin was using with the same name and decided I wanted to make a mead like it. The idea was a peach mead with a cream soda taste in the background. Looked up how to make a cream soda and found it was really a vanilla soda. What vanilla that isn’t used for mead will be made into vanilla extract.
I’m now thinking of the holiday season and am planning on two meads if I can find the ingredients in the store. One will be a cranberry mead similar to the cranberry sauce that Karin makes for Thanksgiving that I like. The other will be a holiday spiced metheglin using traditional holiday spices from a recipe that I found online. The problem that I will be having is seeing if I can have any luck finding cranberries at this time of year. If I can’t, that will have to be one that I make around Thanksgiving and set on the shelf ageing until next year.
