October 14, 2018

This afternoon I started my third batch of mead. I was hoping to find some sour cherries to try to get some wine-like flavors, but they are out of season and I didn’t see anything in the frozen section of my grocery store, so my Plan B was a holiday flavored mead. My wife is obsessed with pumpkin this time of year, but I settled on gingerbread hoping it will be drinkable by the holidays.

My first of two dilemmas was how to infuse the gingerbread flavor. I didn’t want to cheat and get a flavored syrup or essence, so I decided to make homemade gingerbread syrup. I accepted that it was going to be a sweeter mead, so I was ok with adding an amount of syrup to the typical amount of honey I use in 1 gallon batches. I looked at several gingerbread syrup recipes to see the common ingredients. I ended up going with this one, substituting brown sugar for the granulated sugar and using ground cloves and cinnamon instead of whole cloves and a cinnamon stick (because I didn’t have any). It makes a little more than a cup of syrup. After simmering the syrup for awhile, I was a little concerned because it smelled SO STRONGLY of cloves and allspice. But when I tasted it, it had a really nice gingerbread flavor like you might expect in a gingerbread latte, albeit very sweet.

My second dilemma was whether to use straight honey or caramelize it again. My two inputs to this decision were 1) of my two meads thus far, I like my bochet MUCH better than the other, and 2) my wife advised that caramelizing the honey can only make the flavor more interesting. So, I caramelized it. This part went much better the second time around. It took half the time, probably because I started on high heat and then turned it down as the honey came to a boil. Once it began to boil, I tasted a drop of the honey every 5 minutes (after it cooled!) and stopped the caramelization when I thought it tasted really nutty and delicious. Adding the must water to the hot honey was a lot less dramatic now that I knew what to expect. After mixing in all the water, I added the syrup and gave it a good stir to make sure it was well mixed. Then I transferred all the liquid into the fermentation bucket and waited until it got to room temperature.

Then, after a couple of hours, I rehydrated the yeast. This time I used Lalvin EC-1118 yeast. I was nervous about the temperature of the rehydrating liquid because my last batch never started fermenting, presumably because my rehydrating liquid or the must was too hot and killed the yeast. I need to get a candy thermometer. But since I don’t have one, I guessed. I ran some tap water that was between warm and hot. I poured in half a packet of yeast (I had removed it from the fridge before I boiled the honey, so it was at room temp by then). While I waited I put in 1/4 of the prescribed amounts of yeast nutrient and energizer into the must and stirred/shook the fermentation bucket vigorously. Then I took a gravity reading – starting gravity is 1.085. After 15 minutes, I stirred the yeast and pitched it, hoping for the best.

Here’s the full recipe:

To prepare the gingerbread syrup, add the following ingredients to a pot, bring to a boil, and simmer for 25 minutes:

• 2 Tbs grated fresh ginger
• 1 cup dark brown sugar
• 1 cup water (filtered)
• 1 tbs molasses
• 1/2 tsp ground cloves
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• 1/2 tsp allspice
• 1/2 teaspoon whole peppercorns

Then prepare the must:

• 3 lbs Wildflower Honey (I get this from the local farmer’s market) boiled for about 25 minutes
• 1 gallon filtered tap water
• the gingerbread syrup from above
• Yeast energizer and nutrient
• Lalvin EC-1118 yeast – half a packet