#no.060123

[boissonsaumiel]

An Experiment: Rose & Saffron Hydromel

Rose petals from my mother's garden.

Mostly just the wilted ones. She grows those roses for her viewing pleasure and not to cook with, so she wouldn't appreciate it if I took the nice looking ones.

I saw a saffron & rose tea blend and I got the idea to make a saffron and rose mead.

I had two 16oz jars of Arashan honey (Sainfoin and 天山 Wildflower). This will be a half gallon batch, so I'll be using the full Sainfoin jar and half the 天山 Wildflower jar (the rest is for eating).

I started the batch last night. First I made a rose petal smoothie in the blender and then I poured it into the carboy with the honey and water and added wine yeast.

It seemed to take a while to get going. No bubbles were coming out of the airlock when I went to bed last night. Then, when I got up this morning it was bubbling so much the airlock was flooded with pink rosewater and dripping.

Luckily I had tied a t-shirt around my brew bottle (too keep out light) and it managed to absorb any drips, so I didn't have a big mess to clean up.

I took out the stopper, put the cap on, turned it upside down and gave the whole thing a thorough shake, then cleaned and re-inserted the stopper and airlock.

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I plan to put in ~300mg ($3USD worth) of saffron when the gram I ordered comes in the mail tomorrow. I'm guesstimating that amount based on some saffron tea recipes I found online.

[boissonsaumiel]

So I added some gall nut tannin to the Saffron mead about three weeks ago. There was cardamom in there too at one point, but the saffron flavor came through stronger when I tasted it today. I don't know if it was the tannin or the extra three weeks, but the flavor has vastly improved over the last time I tasted it, and now that the off flavors are gone, I think it will be good blended with some of the Rhodomel, which was my original plan for this batch.

They're both a nice rich amber hue, more orange tinted than some of my other batches because of the pigments from the (pink red and yellow) roses and the saffron respectively.

Note: the lighting is weird because I used flash while the room's bright overhead light was on.

Speaking of the Rhodomel, I went to grab it and the stopper had popped out sometime between today and last night without my realizing. I tasted it and it still tastes the same, so I didn't ruin it, thankfully. I think it was just a change in air pressure that forced the stopper out. The room I'm storing it in doesn't have good temperature control, and gets pretty hot in the afternoon. Anyway, I sprayed some argon gas into the bottle (look for wine-saver air cans if you're shopping for argon; it's heavier than oxygen so it creates a layer of inert gas on top of your brew that protects against oxidation) and sealed with a polyseal screw cap.

That'll have to do for now until I start doing some proper bottling.

[boissonsaumiel]

I added a fining agent to 3 half gallon batches of mead today, the rhodomel, a batch that's lightly flavored with cardamom, and an unflavored batch.

I'm racking at the end of the month. I'm going to add lavender and rosemary to the unflavored batch.

I'm going to add saffron to the cardamom flavored batch. Once it's infused, I want to blend it with the rhodomel, which is too intensely rose-flavored to drink on its own, but we'll see. I'll have to do a lot of taste testing to decide if I actually like those flavors together, and if so, what ratios I should use to blend them.

[boissonsaumiel]

I taste tested my rhodomel today.

The rose flavor comes through VERY strongly, which is good. I was warned that the rose flavor might fade a lot if I put the petals in during the primary fermentation phase, but it seems I had nothing to worry about.

I mentioned a while ago that my plan was to do a rose & saffron mead, but instead of making a 1 gallon batch with both flavors, I'm making 2 half gallon batches with each flavor so that if one comes out much stronger than the other I can adjust the ratio later.

The second half gallon batch is as yet unflavored (I plan to put the saffron in once primary fermentation is done). I tasted it today. It has a bit of an odd lemony flavor. I don't mean that it's sour, but rather that it tastes a bit like lemon oil smells. It's also very pale in color compared to my other mead batches (of course, the honey I used was also much paler in color than most of the other honeys I've used).

I was expecting a more neutral flavor, since it came from a fairly neutral tasting honey.

I'm going to wait until both this batch and my Yosemite honey batch are done fermenting, and then decide which (if either) will be better complemented by a saffron infusion.

[boissonsaumiel]

LMAO we will under NO circumstances be doing, looking at, or even thinking about ANYTHING illegal.

...on our channel.

I quite like City Steading Brews. Their videos are better than other mead channels in terms of providing answers to specific questions. The titles are easily searchable, and they usually tell you everything they're going to do and why at the beginning of each video, so you don't usually have to watch the entire video to get the information you need.

I also appreciate that they're not constantly brewing Potion of Shit Yourself. Doin' the Most, for example, is always backsweetening with sweeteners like lactose and erithritol that are indigestible to yeast and, consequently, also indigestible to many, many humans.

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Progress update:

My little bag of pectin arrived in the mail today. I eyeballed about ⅛tsp and dropped it in the rose petal infused mead. It seemed to have a pretty immediate effect. Fewer petals floating on top, more settling. I think it already looks a little clearer even though it's only been an hour or so.

The new half gallon batch I started on the 11th smells ... weird. Not like it's gone bad, but rather like the small amount of parsley I added (I was trying an experimental method of adding vitamins & minerals to the brew) was too much and it has altered the flavor in an undesirable way.

I was originally planning to use that for a saffron infused mead, but now I might use it for a lavender infused mead instead, since lavender should easily overpower any odd flavor left by the parsley.

I will use the batch I had intended for the lavender infused mead for my saffron mead. That batch was smaller than a half gallon though, so...

...I started 1 more backup batch.

I lied, slightly, when I said I was at capacity earlier. I still had 1 unused airlock and one drilled rubber stopper small enough to fit in one of the empty 750ml wine/bourbon bottles I never got around to recycling.

So now I'm really, truly at capacity.

[boissonsaumiel]

Rose Mead Progress Update

The new rose infused mead batch started to overflow again within a couple hours of re-inserting the airlock. I spent the day watching it with the bottle top open, giving it a good shake every 3 hours or so to release extra gas.

The petal puree floating at the top created a kind of a natural airlock, which was fascinating from a scientific standpoint. The gas from the fermentation was building up in the layer of floating petal mulch and pushing it up into the bottle opening, which was neat both to watch and to listen to.

Vaguely unsettling quiet squelching noises, like the breathing of a baby swamp monster.

By evening it had calmed down enough to re-insert the airlock.

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I may have gone overboard on the rose petals. The batch is very fragrant.

I've decided instead of making 1 rose saffron mead, I will make 1 rose mead and a separate saffron mead, and see how the flavors balance each other once both batches are finished aging.