August 19, 2018

Today I cooked up the Bochet using the following recipe:

• 2 cups cold brew coffee (Trader Joe’s Bolivian Fair Trade, steeped for 24 hours, prepared ahead of time)
• 3 lbs Wildflower Honey (I get this from the local farmer’s market) boiled for about 50 minutes
• 10 cups filtered tap water
• Yeast energizer and nutrient
• Red Star Premium Rouge yeast
• Vanilla bean (scraped and added after 7 days fermentation)

To start, I made cold brew coffee the night before. I used Trader Joe’s Bolivian Fair Trade coffee, which is what I drink most days. I had hoped to make 5 cups but only 2 cups came out. I think this will be fine – again I want a coffee flavor but not overpowering.

I pulled the yeast out of the fridge to let it go to room temp.

I get my honey from a neighborhood farmer’s market. It’s labeled Wildflower Honey. It’s really runny compared to most honeys and easy to pour. It’s very floral and tastes somewhat of licorice.

I boiled 3lbs of this honey for about 40 minutes. No surprises here. I stirred constantly. The smell was awesome. It filled the whole house for about 5 hours.  While it boiled I added the 2 cups of coffee plus 2.5 quarts of filtered water to the fermentation bucket. After 40 minutes, I took the honey off the heat and I added a couple of spoons of the must to the honey – it spattered big-time. After the 3rd or 4th spoonful of must it stopped spattering, so i poured the rest of the must water into the honey and stirred it. Then i dumped everything into the fermentation bucket and shook it vigorously for about 5 minutes. It was hot but not overly. Lots of pressure (and mess).

I rehydrated the yeast like this: heated 1/4 cup water for 45 seconds in the microwave. I waited a couple of minutes and added 1/3 of the yeast nutrient and energizer, stirring it til dissolved. Then I added the yeast. I waited a few minutes then stirred the yeast water until creamy. I waited a few more minutes then spooned a couple of teaspoons of the must into the yeast water to temper. Then pitched the yeast. After a few hours, the mead is bubbling like crazy! More vigorously than the blueberry mead ever did. OG = 1.10.

My Blueberry Lavender mead is still bubbling in secondary.