Base Idea: Recipe for Barkshack Ginger Mead - from Charlie Papalizian's "Joy of Home Brewing"
Own Recipe (in an attempt to salvage the most horrid kit beer I ever brewed):
20 Bottles of previously brewed "Wilde Dry"
3 Kg (about 6.6 Lb) Natural Unpasteurized Honey
~2 oz. Freshly Grated Ginger Root (some was just chopped up)
1 tsp. Gypsum
2 tsp. Super Nutrient
1 Tbsp. Irish Moss Flakes
1 packet Brewers Yeast (sorry, I don't know what kind - back then I didn't realize there was a difference)
Sunday, December 19/93
Boiled 1 cup of the Honey in 8 bottles of Dry beer for 20 minutes. Put in primary fermenter, straining ginger root out of wort with colander. Boiled 6 more bottles of dry with the strained out ginger root, 2 tsp Super Nutrient, 1 (unmeasured) Tbsp Irish Moss, and about 2 kg of the honey for 19 minutes. Added 1 tsp of Gypsum Powder toward the end of the boil.
Boiled the last 6 bottles of dry with the remainder of the 3 kg. of honey for 20 minutes.
Notes: None of the protein from the honey was spooned off during boil. Shelley claims I have put in too much Ginger. I say I should have added more. Added cold water to primary to up levels to around 25 litres (the plastic primary is not yet marked for 25 litres, so I had to guess. Once mead is transferred to secondary fermenter, I will top off the level needed.
Took Measurements: Temp 30 S.G. 1.040
It should be a good beer-like fermentation.
Monday, December 20/93
Took Measurement: Temp 23
Added contents of yeast packet directly to pail. Covered with plastic garbage bag.
Monday, December 27/93
Took Measurements: Temp 22 S.G.: 1.008
Transferred to carboy. Then added 2 1/2 pots of water to bring level to 25 litres. This changed the S.G. to 1.010. I don't understand why it did this; I thought the S.G. would be altered closer to 1.000 if water is added.
Saturday, January 15/94
Cloricleaned 2nd Carboy. Used Hot Water to clean Fermentation Lock, siphon hose, and the Big Spoon. I then siphoned the Dry Salvage Ginger Mead from Carboy 1 (where it has now sat for 1 month) to Carboy 2. Was very careful to leave the considerable white sludge in Carboy 1.
Temperature: 72 degrees F.
Added Isinglass finings to 1 cup of the DSGM, stirred and added to Carboy 2.
S.G. Reading from Carboy 2: .996
Added about 3 or 4 cups of boiling water to Carboy 2 to top it off. No appreciable change in S.G.. I then Sanitized the original Carboy.
Sunday, February 5/94
Mead had looked very clear for a couple of weeks now. Siphoned into sterilized plastic pail and added 3/4 cup? (Whatever the amount on the Brewers Art "how to make beer" sheet said) of corn sugar. Bottled all of it in long-necked beer bottles. It should be ready to drink by Tuesday the 15th, but I think it will be really good by summer.
S.G. still at .996, by the way.
Alcohol Content=
1.040 - .996 = 0.044 x 105 = 4.62% by Weight
4.62 x 1.25 = 5.8% by Volume
Final Appreciation:
I really enjoyed this one after it aged a bit. The ginger taste is a very good companion to the honey taste. The horrid taste of the screwed up Dry Beer Kit was gone, but the beeriness remained.
A good friend claims this is the best beverage of any kind he had ever had in his life. He hounded me for the next 6 years to repeat the process (I stopped brewing for 6 years for various reasons). Finally, after my wife and I bought a new house and he put our kitchen floor in for us, he refused to charge any labour except that I had to get brewing again and attempt to recreate this batch. Since it involved completely screwing up a kit beer and I have no idea what we did wrong with that kit beer, and then taking half the kit beer and recooking it to place in with honey and ginger, I have no faith that it can be recreated exactly. But as of November of 2003, I have still not managed to replicate it. I have made some interesting brews in the attempt, however!
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