boissonsaumiel

[boissonsaumiel]

The tube of food grade silicone sealant I bought has vanished. I am ANNOYED. I bought more. I'm traveling in a week, and I want to make sure the two bottles I'm bringing are extra, extra well sealed.

[boissonsaumiel]

I racked the December batch of hōjicha tea mead yesterday. It tastes young. There are no off flavors, but it needs more aging to help the flavors mellow. It has a sharp alcohol kick that you feel but don't really taste. Just a burning sensation in the throat as you swallow.

I tried experimenting with some acids I bought (lactic, malic, tartaric). I determined that this mead doesn't need any acid additions after all. Of the three, the tartaric acid was the only one that didn't make it taste worse, but it also didn't make it taste better. Hōjicha tea naturally contains gallic acid, which is also found in oak apples (the fruit of the oak tree), aka gall nuts according to its wikipedia page. There's actually a tannin powder brewing suppliers sell made from gall nuts.

The mouthfeel is a little thin. I'll wait until June to see how much it improves on its own and then maybe add some maltodextrin if I'm still not happy with it.

I plan to submit this one to the Mead Stampede competition.

.

A while ago I split the blackberry blossom honey mead into two batches, and blended one with my pomegranate wine.

I bottled the blended batch now that it has almost entirely cleared.

It is also going to need quite a bit of aging to mellow out properly. The unblended batch is still quite cloudy, so I'll wait to bottle it.

#mead making #home brewing #No.112423 #No.011324 #No.110523 #mead journaling #progress photos

[boissonsaumiel]

I’m drying some pineapple weed flowers. They grow all over my local public park this time of year so I always try to collect some when I go on walks there.

Also known as “wild chamomile”(Matricaria discoidea) it is closely related to conventional chamomile (Matricaria chamomilla) and has similar culinary uses. The whole plant is edible. The leaves taste nice but they’re really fibrous so they aren’t great in salads unless you really love chewing. It gives off a sweet smell when crushed. The scent is regarded as somewhere between that of pineapple and chamomile, hence the plant's common names.

I’d like to flavor some mead with these.

#california wildlife #foraging #mead making #medicinal plants

[boissonsaumiel]

I added some tannin today and some more yeast nutrient. The last time I fermented cactus flower honey I did not use enough nutrient and even when it finally aged enough to taste good the sulfur smell still hadn't quite faded from the bouquet.

Speaking of, I haven't taste tested that batch in a while. I added a campden tablet and mixed it with some of my forbidden rice wine as an experiment. It might be drinkable now.

Started a new batch today. Cactus flower honey + a little bit of other honey and silver needle white tea.

#No.032324 #No.092423 #No.103123

[boissonsaumiel]

Started a new batch today. Cactus flower honey + a little bit of other honey and silver needle white tea.

#No.032324

[boissonsaumiel]

vegans make peace with honey

no shut up do it

[boissonsaumiel]

The Life Cycle of a Blackberry

[boissonsaumiel]

I bottled the pomegranate wine today. The flavor is much milder than I expected. Not nearly as intensely pomegranate-y as the unfermented juice. It reminds me a lot of drinking a rosé. I got four 16oz bottles out of it.

As you can see in the photo, the color of the pomegranate wine (right) is almost exactly the same as the forbidden rice wine (left).

I also racked the blackberry blossom honey mead from a gallon wide mouth fermenter into 2 half gallon bottles. One ended up much fuller than the other, and there were about 16 oz of pomegranate wine+lees left in the pomegranate fermenter after bottling, so I added the pomegranate dregs to the less full half gallon bottle.

Technically that makes that bottle my first attempt at a melomel.

I'm going to let those two half gallons continue aging under airlock.

#home brewing #wine making #No.110523 #No.011324 #No.103123 #progress photos #mead journaling

[boissonsaumiel]

I haven't talked about this batch in forever. This is the experiment where I tried to see if rice wine starter could saccharify and ferment other starches besides rice starch and added it to a batch containing oat flour, maca powder, water and molasses.

It's actually still fermenting.

It's been fermenting for nearly 4 months. It seemed to have stopped for a bit and then I turned up the space heater a few degrees and it flooded the airlock. It's about 78°F in the room.

I think the rice wine starter is having a much harder time converting oat starch into sugar than it usually has with rice starch. It's still doing it, but it's taking a lot longer.

Added 1lb of molasses to the "beer" batch. As you can see it has all sunk to the bottom. I'll stir it up tomorrow. I also tried adding a couple crushed up digestive enzyme supplement tablets to help along the saccharification of the oat flour. I sense the rice wine starter I used had an easier time processing the starch in the maca powder than the starch in the oat flour.

The rice wine seems like it's finishing up. Hardly any bubbling. I'll wait till I come back from my holiday trip at the end of the month to strain it.

#home brewing #science experiments #No.112423

[boissonsaumiel]

#neat #home brewing #brewing history #history of alcohol #Youtube

[boissonsaumiel]

fuzzy puffs love artichoke fluffs pt 2

#bees

[boissonsaumiel]

I'm looking up 350ml wine bottles on amazon.

The ones they have only come with liquor bottle style T-corks, which unlike standard wine corks, aren't truly airtight and more importantly, aren't permitted at the meadmaking competition I plan on entering. Any competition entries with T-corks are automatically disqualified.

The competition does technically also allow capped beer bottles, but it's hard to get a proper seal with the cheap double lever hand capper I bought, and it doesn't look as nice.

Anyway,

I checked the customer Q&A on the product page to make sure the wine bottles took standard corks. Every time someone asked "Can these fit standard corks?"/"What size straight corks would fit in these?" 95% of the responses were just people unhelpfully and condescendingly responding, "They already come with corks! Check the product info!"

Thankfully one single person gave an actual answer that yes, #8 corks should fit.

It's always a bit maddening when people answer a straightforward question with the information they think you need, instead of the information you actually asked for. It makes me wish there were a way to downvote answers.

#home brewing

[boissonsaumiel]

I get so annoyed when the white mead bros are like, "There are Viking records of mead dating back 3000 years BCE, making it the world's oldest alcoholic beverage!"

Mead was discovered, not invented by Vikings.

Mead has existed since bees and bad weather have existed, so it's like 120 million years old. There are bees in Ethiopia who build their hives in hollowed out trees, and sometimes a storm will flood the tree and destroy the hive and the tree hollow will fill up with naturally occurring mead.

Ethiopia is the cradle of humanity, where Homo Sapiens Sapiens first evolved.

That means humans discovered mead, and most likely started intentionally brewing it long before humans invented white people.

#mead making

[boissonsaumiel]

This meadery specializes in still dry meads, which are my favorite kind. I will definitely have to check this place out when I go to NYC this summer.

#professional meaderies #mead making #Youtube

[boissonsaumiel]

"I love a light crisp dry session mead, but for a wine strength or sack strength mead, you really need sweetness to balance—"

Coward.

I am not interested in reinventing a Chardonnay. If anything, I'm trying to make something that resembles a port wine-strength bourbon. Every time some brewtuber gives advice on how to improve my mead's mouthfeel/viscosity/flavor profile, I'm just like:

#home brewing #mead making #wine making

[boissonsaumiel]

important service announcement, there is absolutely nothing that will make you feel cooler than opening the door to the hidey hole in your tree to secret away a finished bottle of dandelion mead.

#goals

[boissonsaumiel]

I looked up a couple other mead competitions, and they also asked for 12oz bottles, so I guess that's the standard competition size.

So I’m thinking of submitting to Mead Stampede this year.

The entry fee is cheap, but bottling and shipping my entries will be expensive.