Infamous Bathtub Mead

This mead will be my venture into the world of highly aromatic spices. It was inspired by a trip to the Southwest Bee Supply store: a tiny little hole-in-the-wall store on the more ghetto corner of 19th St. and 6th Ave in Tucson that sells locally-produced mesquite honey and beeswax-based products... and frankly smells like heaven when you walk in.

Ingredients:

9 lbs fresh Sonoran mesquite honey

1 oz dried lavender flowers

1 oz (approx 1 package) fresh rosemary

1 oz (approx 1/2 package) fresh sage

~3 gal distilled water from the Hippie-mart

1 package Lalvin D47 yeast

Tools:

1 3-gal sized Hill-folk jug

1 plug & gas trap

1 big ass pot

1 funnel

1 auto-siphon

food grade iodine

K Sorbate

Coffee filter or must bag

The usual deal: sterilize the shit out of everything that's going to touch the mead. Warm (don't boil) ~1 gallon of water in the big-ass pot. Dissolve the honey into the warm water (this honey smells so good that you don't want to overheat and break down all the really good natural compounds that give it that complex scent). Pour it into the hill-folk jug and top off with the rest of the distilled water (giving it a good swirl to properly mix). Allow to cool, then pitch the yeast and stick it somewhere to ferment. Rack it off the yeast poop once somewhere in there for good measure. Stabilize with K sorbate when tasty.

Since yeast seems to eat away the more delicate flavorings in a mead, save the lavender flowers, fresh rosemary, and sage until the clarification stage. Rack and replace mead in hill-folk jug. Then, take the coffee filter or must-bag and fill it with the flowers. Coarsely cut up fresh rosemary and tear up sage leaves (just enough so the leaves begin releasing oils) and put them in the bag with the flowers. Cram that into the stabilized mead and wait until everything is nice and clear. Rack and bottle when it's "ready".

NOTE: Until this has been tested out, I won't know how long this mead will take to get "tasty". This is also my venture into 3-gallon sized batches, so I will be further experimenting and recording timing results. This mead will not have officially earned a real name until I can successfully repeat the recipe, so until then I will just be referring to it as the "Infamous Bathtub Mead".

2/21/10 - Started the infamous "bathtub mead" adventure. Made big fucking mess. Everything is sticky. Heated 1 gallon hippie-mart distilled H20, dissolved ~8 lbs delicious natural mesquite honey in heated water (with heat off). Dumped 0.8oz lavender and 0.5oz rosemary into warm must, and let it stand for 2 hours in pot (stinky Arschwein Beta must bag made it into must and was removed quickly - dumped herbs directly into must to avoid mysterious stink). Diluted into 2.5-2.8 gallons total of hippie-mart distilled H20. Added yeast directly to now-lukewarm must. Saved leftover unyeasted must in honey canister to top off carboy after first racking.

2/22/10 - Mead-splosion some time overnight. Counter completely sticky. Fermentation going full speed ahead.

4/18/10 - Racked and stabilized. It kind of smells terrible and tastes gross too. I'm worried I might have spice-bombed it and made it all yeasty without the subtle rosemary or lavender flavor (the yeast might have eaten the spices and made especially nasty yeast poop). Then again, I always have a real disappointing first reaction to my mead after the initial taste. I'll dump some dried lavender in it again soon after tasting it once it clears up a little and the yeast poop sinks to the bottom. Man, I hope I didn't make a 3 gallon bomb.

4/27/10 - It smells better...