Class 26 Mead

Wanted to brew a semi-sweet mead, using Tupelo honey and tangerine juice. We have a mature tangerine tree in our back yard, and it is prolific. Last year we couldn't keep up with the fruit, so I juiced and froze a bunch: ten pounds of juice. It measured 17 brix on my refractometer. Finally got around to making the mead this month. It fermented almost 3 weeks in primary, at 65F, and is now ready to rack to secondary. I tasted it, and it tastes like high octane Tang! It is a cloudy, pale orange in color now, but should clear nicely after I ignore it for 6 months in secondary. There's both tangerine and honey aromatics a plenty right now.

Attempting to produce a semi-sweet mead with 14% alcohol and 2% residual sugar. If it comes out even half as good as Wickham's killer raspberry melomel, I'll be well pleased.

I was recently in Columbia, SC where a creative mixologist gave me a drink with all the flavor elements of Tom Yom Khai soup. My imagination, being the way it is, devised a mead recipe with the flavor elements of Thai cooking.

For all the mead makers out there! This is a historical recipe taken from a 1500's source. The recipe is verbatim from the book. Notice how the author determines gravity, by the must floating an egg!!! The book has been used for historical research in brewing and cookery. The book is available for downloading at Project Guttenberg (www.gutenberg.org). Title: The Closet of Sir Kenelm Digby Knight Opened