Brewing - Small Batch - Hot, Steamy Bochet of Love

It's Valentine's Day, and like many couples, my wife and I spent it doing things together.  Specifically, we spent it starting a batch of bochet out of an extra half-gallon of mesquite honey we had lying around.  For those who don't know, bochet is a mead made from caramelized honey.  This was a much more technically demanding task than the simple 3:1 and yeast that we'd been doing, or even throwing fruit in there and hoping it sticks.  Caramelization was the complication; the recipe was still 3:1, aiming at two gallons, using standard champagne yeast.

Now, the first thing you need to know about our setup is that it is thoroughly non-scientific, partly because of a lack of appropriate instrumentation, partly because literally anyone could learn to do it this way with the least complicated setup imaginable.  If I were to do this for a living, like the folks at Dancing Bee, in Rogers, Texas, who taught us, I'd have the same commercial setup and careful controls for specific gravity, et cetera, that they have, but even their mead maker freely admits that he learned his craft homebrewing in his kitchen.

The first step was re-liquefying the crystallized honey.  To do this, we used a double boiler setup and poured off the honey into a saucepan as it liquefied.  Honey breaks down from crystalline to liquid form at about the same point that water can scald human skin - about 130-150 degrees - so manipulating the honey jug could be tricky for the pour-off.  While this was going on, we put aside a quart of water with half a package of brewer's yeast and about a half-tablespoon of honey to start a must.

We poured the liquefied honey off in quart batches for caramelization.  Caramelization is, because of our setup, much more art than science - our candy thermometer died several months ago, so our notes for how long this caramelized were "until it smelled slightly bitter."  At this point the honey is near boiling temperatures, in fact caramelization is primarily a boil-off of the water content and a concentration of sugars, with some minor organic chemistry on the side to impact the flavor profile.  If it goes too far, it will burn; this is how we burned our house down once upon a time, doing something very similar to prepare syrup for our beehives.

"Until it smelled slightly bitter" was, give or take two minutes, twenty minutes per batch over medium heat.  As it came to this consistency, we added a quart or so of hot-bath-temperature water to our small-batch pot, to temper the glass before the hot honey went in.  My wife drained the honey off and scraped the saucepan to capture everything while I stirred the partly liquefied other quart to a more or less liquid consistency.  When we were able to pull all of the liquids off, we repeated the caramelization process.  In the meantime, I pulled a gallon of hot-bath-temperature water into the gallon jug that had held the honey, to clean the jug and to add to the final total.

Once all the honey was in and the total volume brought up to two gallons, we let it to sit, because we did not want to kill the yeast.  "Letting it sit" turned out to take about four hours to get it down to "warm to touch," at which point we added the must, put the lid on, because we had changed some of the sugars, added a tablespoon of yeast nutrient, and then set it aside in the laundry room, the most consistently stable temperature room in our house.

This was the most complicated brew we've done so far, and because we had some particulates settle out, I am uncertain that the yeast will take; next step is observation.