waxcapping

Back in April I posted about making mead for marriage gifts. The batch that inspired that post is in bottles now, and we've already given the first bottle away. I figured I'd do a quick followup to mention a final step I took before considering this project complete.



Mead is a drink that does best if aged for long periods. The last batch I brewed didn't really start to seem "right" until about two years after adding the yeast to the must. But the typical crowns we cap bottles with aren't really meant to sit for very long. The rubber on the inside starts to degrade, and the crown loses its ability to maintain an airtight seal.



So, for this most recent batch of mead, I capped each bottle with a layer of wax. The was isn't subject to the same degradation that can affect the rubber in the crowns, so it should create a more durable, longer-lasting seal. It wasn't hard to do: just buy some wax and melt it in an old pot, then dip the top of each bottle in the melted mixture. Make sure the pot you use is one you don't plan on using for anything but melting wax in the future, because it's a pain in the butt to try to clean out the pot afterward.

blending juices for cider

I made my first cider almost a year ago, and enjoyed the experience. It was incredibly easy to do, and I was happy with how the final product turned out: a refreshing drink on its own, and an interesting alternative to beer.

I've been meaning to brew another cider, and I finally got around to it a few months back. This time I wanted to experiment with blending juices, to see how that would affect the final drink. Despite enjoying the first cider, it felt a bit simple, less-interesting than it could have been. I wanted to see if mixing in another juice would result in a more complex drink.



I decided to try adding in a little grape juice--hoping the sweetness of the juice would convert into a tartness that would enhance the crispness of the apples--and I settled on a mix of one quart of grape juice to two gallons of apple juice. I used the same yeast I'd used before--Red Star Pasteur Champagne, which is a very dry champagne yeast that removes virtually any sweetness from the drink, allowing the tart and sour flavors to shine forth.

The most interesting thing for me about adding the grape was how potent it is as an ingredient, how strongly it effects the aroma, flavor, and color of the final product. Despite there being 8 times more apple juice in the mix, the presence of the grape juice was undeniable.



Another interesting thing about the final drink was the way the aroma of the grapes carried through pretty much unchanged, despite the complete transformation of the grape flavor. It was fascinating, even slightly jarring, to bring the glass to your nose and smell sweet grapes, and then take a sip and experience absolutely no sweetness.

And one last little note: back in January of last year I tried brewing a poi beer, hoping to somehow capture the lovely color of the poi in final drink. In the end I failed to do it there, but to my surprise this apple-grape cider turned out to have pretty close to the exact color I'd been hoping for with that poi brew.



So try it. Start drinking purple!

Making Mead

Wedding season is coming up. My wife and I have four weddings we'll be attending this summer, three of which are happening here on O'ahu, and going to weddings usually involves giving a wedding gift. I'm not especially excited about picking an item off a Williams Sonoma registry--seems sort of impersonal to me, you know?--so I've decided to give the newlyweds a gift of homebrewed mead instead.

You see, mead is a drink traditionally associated with weddings. The term honeymoon even relates to it. In olden days, after the wedding ceremony the couple would go into isolation for the period of a lunar cycle (which *cough cough* just happens to roughly coincide with a woman's menstrual cycle). During that time they'd drink mead and work on producing a male heir. The isolation was to help insure that the heir was the true sire of the husband. The mead was to inspire them in their work, and to increase the chance of the fruit of that work being male (mead can affect the PH of the body, and the PH of the woman's body during conception apparently affects the gender of the child conceived).

Anyway, heir or no, honeymoon or no, mead can be a pretty wonderful drink. I've been thinking about it more seriously recently because, as opposed to beer, the ingredients for mead can be entirely produced in Hawaii.

See, beer consists of barley, hops, water and yeast. The barley and hops don't grow well in Hawaii--they've developed in regions of greater latitude, which offer more sunlight hours in the summertime (in Hawaii we get like 13 hours of sunlight in the summer; in Washington state they get 16). But mead is mainly honey, water, and yeast. And honey is locally produced pretty much anywhere that plants grow, including Hawaii.

Another benefit to brewing mead in Hawaii is that the yeasts normally used in mead fermentation are often more tolerant of higher temperatures, whereas beer yeasts usually like it to be cooler. Dealing with Hawaii's warm temperatures has been a constant struggle for my brewing here. I've resorted to swamp-coolers and a cooler bag, and I've experimented with different yeast strains, all to minimize off-flavors produced by hot fermentations. The best luck I've had resulted from using more heat-tolerant yeasts.

So, for all of these reasons, I've decided to give mead-making another try (I did a batch back in San Fran that turned out pretty good, but I never got back to it till now.) Last month I got my hands on nine pounds of Organic, locally-sourced (Big Island) honey from Wililaiki Blossom nectar, and turned it into a mead. My plan is to bottle it next month, and then to give a bottle to each of the newly married couples with a recommendation to wait to open the bottle until at least their first year anniversary (which doesn't go along with the traditional honeymoon idea, but hey--my experience with mead leads me to believe that the longer the aging process, the better). Of course, I'll have plenty of bottles saved for myself, and I'll be sure to post how they turn out.

spent-grain thin mints

I'm a big fan of the chocolate-mint flavor combo, and my wife is kind enough to indulge me. She recently made a batch of the Spent Grain Thin Mints featured in the Brooklyn Brewshop recipe site. The comments on that page are kind of mixed, but the cookies my wife made turned out great--very minty and chocolaty. There was a slight grittiness from the spent grains, but it actually added pleasant texture (and helped to slow me down a bit--I've been known to go through a half dozen thin mints before I even realize it).

making sidra

Back in May I attended the Big Brew Day event held by local brewclub HOPS (Homebrewers on Pacific Shores). I met a bunch of people there, and drank a bunch of homebrew. One of the drinks that stood out to me was a home-made cider. I can't remember the name of the guy who did it, but he confided that it was the easiest thing he's ever brewed: just buy a bunch of unfiltered, unpasteurized apple juice and throw it in a carboy with some yeast. I decided I wanted to give it a try.

And so I have. I went down the local, organic grocery store and bought four one-gallon jugs of Mrs. Gooch's cider. Cost me about $35 bucks. Then I went to the brew store and bought a packet of dry champagne yeast for $1.75. I poured the juice in a sanitized carboy, pitched the yeast, and stuck an airlock on top. Two weeks later I primed it with 2/5 a cup of brown sugar and put it in bottles. I started drinking it the next day.

At this point the cider has been in bottles for less than a week. I'm not sure how it'll change, but right now it really reminds me of the "sidra" you get in the Asturias region of northern Spain. (The picture above shows me pouring sidra in the traditional manner, in which you try to maximize the fall to force air into the drink.) It's lightly carbonated, just enough to give a certain sharpness to the drink (cider never really forms a head like beer because apple juice doesn't have the same proteins found in grain, its carbonation is more like soda). It tastes mostly like apple juice, with a hint of champagne. And it's deceptively strong--about 7.5%, but you end up drinking it faster than beer, and you might be two bottles in before it starts to hit).

All in all, it's a decent drink. Try it!

(Here's another picture, showing a guy wearing traditional Asturian clothes, pouring cider in the traditional way--though it looks like he's missing the glass more than hitting it.)