I’ve got a “hefty braggot” fermenting.
A braggot is a mead made with malted grain. I slightly modified a recipe from The Complete Meadmaker by Ken Schramm (I used his extract option):
6 lbs. Munton’s plain amber malt extract
5 oz. Cascade hops
1 oz. Mt. Hood hops
in 4 gallons of water.
Boiled 30 minutes, added another 3 oz. Mt. Hood, boiled another 30 minutes, added 3 more oz. Mt. Hood, boiled a final two minutes then cut the heat.
I chilled to about 140 F, then added 10 lbs. of buckwheat honey I bought in upstate NY on vacation for $2 a pound. Stirred, held at 140 F for 22 minutes, then chilled to room temperature.
Transferred to a glass carboy, brought it up to 5 gallons, then added 10 g of Lalvin D-47, rehydrated. The O.G. was 1.120. It is supposed to finish around 1.018.
Before adding the yeast I tasted a little bit of the wort/must. Extremely sweet, as you might well imagine, with strong hops bitterness. Just what I was aiming for.
(Schramm’s recipe actually calls for 9 pounds of honey, but I had two 5 pound jars and didn’t want to save any remnants. He also calls for half as much hops as I used but says if you are a hops lover you can double the amount, so I took him up on it.)
The next morning the fermentation was going like gangbusters. I lost a couple of quarts to krausen but no great loss, I think.
He says it should end up caramelly sweet, and goes well with things like steak pie, or pot roast, but also spicy cuisines like Mexican. With the amount of hops I put in it probably will need to age at least 6-9 months before it starts to approach its peak.
I am slightly concerned about the use of buckwheat honey, an online search reveals it is considered problemmatic for mead in some quarters…people speak of a “barnyard” or “wet dog” aspect that can be very persistent. I liked the taste of the honey I had, though. That is, until I read all this stuff online, then I had to convince myself MY honey didn’t have any of those characteristics.
Anyway, I’m real excited. I’ve made mead before but I boiled the honey which Schramm considers a big no-no. Also I used supermarket honey which I now realize is rather characterless. This is the first time I’ve used such a dark, robust honey, and this no-boil (for the honey) technique.
In a couple of weeks I am going to try Schramm’s Fall’s Bounty Cyser, with cider from one of the local apple orchards, and wildflower honey from a place in Western Mass.