Brewing notes and ponders

[kiya]

Braggot #2 recipe -- 5 gallons. 3.3 pounds of malt for five gallons = 2/3 pound malt for one. Brewing place sells 3.3 pound sizes, it is to meh.

That's five pounds of honey, so one for a gallon for the base. Want to make it more a mead than a beer by preference. Bee's Lee's basic mead is 10 lbs/5 gallons, so that's up to two; malt is also a fermentable, though. Hm.

Doing the boil with spices, probably want to check the quickie metheglin recipe for thoughts. That's . . . here. Other recipe involving ginger suggests adding the ginger to the tail end of the boil.

Spices -- juniper, cumin, ginger. Cumin and juniper classed as peppery metheglin here. Careful on not overdoing the ginger, according to that site. Should find proportions. One recipe for ginger-focused mead has 1.5 tbsp for a five gallon. May want to add a little tea to the boil.

Let's see.
If I do half a pound of malt, a pound and a half of honey, a spoonful or so of ginger, some juniper berries and cumin, and half a spoonful of black tea. Want to get citrus honey for this, I think, to get the acids in if I can; might want to add some of my dried citrus peel if not. K. That'll do for an experiment.

Should look up lime melomels. Make mental note.

Comments

[brooksmoses]

That does sound interesting. If you're interpolating between the two recipes, though, to get the 1.5 pounds of honey, wouldn't you want to also put a third of a pound of malt rather than a half? Or else the half pound of malt and only 1.25 pounds of honey....

[kiya]

Mead recipes in general vary between one and two pounds of honey to the gallon, more or less. The braggot in question is for something more to the beer end of the spectrum, and I want something meadier without losing the malt aspect. So I'm upping the honey in the hope of getting that flavor into a more primary role, but only reducing the malt very slightly. Booze is a flexible creature to cultivate.

I return from the grocery, triumphant! I am random! I have B vitamins, Claritin, raw chicken fingers, four liters of Coke, a gallon of whole milk, two pounds of honey, and a lime.

[brooksmoses]

Ah, ok. It still sounds likely to have more fermentables than the recipes you're extrapolating it from, but I imagine that the yeast can deal.

And that does sound like a very random selection of things. I ponder chicken in a honey-lemon cream sauce, but milk isn't that good for cream sauces, and cream and lime probably don't work anyhow. Still, honey-lime chicken sounds good.

[kiya]

It'll be lime-garlic chicken, actually, but we already had the garlic. :)

[leanne-opaskar.livejournal.com]

Slightly off-topic, but semi-relevant .... since you brew, you probably don't buy any mead, right? But I found a very nice blackberry "honey wine" in my local Jimbo's that I was quite delighted with. (And you know me -- I don't drink! (: )

Just thought I'd mention it ... didn't know if you'd tried a blackberry version yet. (:

[kiya]

I haven't tried blackberry, no. I have ambition to do cherry or strawberry if my plants produce a good amount of fruit at some point. :}

Rrgh, this melomel is producing a tremendous amount of scum.

On the other hand, dinner is smelling wonderful. Yay food.