A Miscellany of Projects - Gaming, SCA Combat, Arts & Sciences, and Travel

As I discussed   elsewhere , my wife and I went to San Antonio for her birthday, and for one of those days went on a tour of alcohol acquisition in central Texas.  I've already covered the meaderies we visited - Rohan in La Grange and Texas Mead Works in Hye - and here I will cover the other three stops. Hye Cider Company   is, by a quirk of brewing, the oldest meadery in Hye - a cyser is a hybrid made with pears or apples and honey in various proportions, and Hye Cider stocks mostly cyser rather than purebred cider, which uses primarily fruit sugars for fermentation.  That is hardly its only claim to fame, but it is worth noting because my first memory of Hye Cider Company is a few years ago, watching honeybees trying to collect sugars from their countertop.  Their entire sales area is open to the outside world, which can impact tasting flavors depending on the season.  Colder weather tends to suppress some of the aromatic components of taste, while hot we...

Over the years, my wife and I have become drinkers.  Perhaps more importantly, we have a defined palate.  We have a   preferred Washington bourbon provider  (Heritage Distilling Company, for those who don't want to click through, in various spots in the Pacific Northwest), a   preferred Washington cider provider  (Finnriver Cider, in Chimacum, WA), a   preferred Texas meadery  (Dancing Bee, in Rogers, TX), have made elaborate side-trips to stop at   a meadery we like   (Redstone Meadery, Boulder, CO), and have even occasionally made borderline-dangerous U-turns in the rain to stop at   meaderies we spotted from the road   (The Meading Room, Sonoita, AZ).  We have a  preferred import brand of mead  (Dansk Mjød).  It's so far-gone that we currently have something along the lines of twenty stored gallons of homebrew and are considering getting a still. Especially when it comes to mead, in other words, we have s...

  Earlier this week , I discussed the first round of ice mead results.  Since then I've had a chance to test an easier-to-process method than doing it in a bottle. Procedure The procedure is mostly unmodified.  Since it was the exact same batch as the previous procedure, brewing method was exactly the same. Modifications to Previous Procedure - Apparatus Instead of a 750mL bottle, I used a one-gallon square ice cream bucket.  The square bucket was used to allow easy pour-off when the time came, and because storage of a square bucket in a freezer is an economic use of space. Modifications to Previous Procedure - Materials. I used approximately half a gallon (approx. 2000mL), eyeball measure only, of bochet as a test volume, instead of a 750mL bottle.  This was based on the very small pour-off results from the first batch; I wanted sufficient volume to produce measurable results, instead of the tablespoon of ice mead created the first time. Modifications to Previo...

A couple weeks ago, I posted about the first batch of '21 for brewing.  There isn't a lot to give in terms of update there, except that I ran my bochet past my parents, who aren't mead drinkers, and they liked it.  I pulled a 750mL bottle of the bochet two days ago and put it in the outdoor freezer to see what would happen.  More on that in a moment. Background Before I go any further, I am going to preface this by saying that there are some non-technical general terms I'm going to use that require definitions for my purposes.  "Beer-strength" indicates an alcoholic beverage between 4% and 10% alcohol by volume (ABV).  "Wine-strength" is 10-20% ABV.  "Spirit" is 20% ABV or stronger.  This differs from convention in that I am not separating spirits and liqueurs. Freezing distillation is a historically documentable method for increasing effective alcohol concentration; while distillation as a means of improving alcohol content is traceable t...

 As discussed way back when I started this blog , we laid down eight gallons of mead in January, and another two gallons in a small batch in February.  We taste-tested all three batches of mead, and the results are as follows: Orange blossom honey, no additives - Semi-dry, still minor fermentation occurring, flavor profile well-balanced.  Sweet comes through.  Plan is to save several bottles in dry state, for people who prefer their meads dry, and to back-sweeten, probably a quart of honey to the remaining three gallons of mead. Orange blossom honey, ginger and orange - Dry, but an exceptionally good flavor.  So far this is the best batch that we have done.  Fermentation reaction is complete, no remaining fizz.  Plan is to pull the remaining solids off the top, save several bottles in dry state, and back-sweeten remaining three gallons at same proportions as listed above. Bochet - Sweet, almost but not quite on the point of Neil Gaiman's "sweet pickle...

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 f...

Today we laid down the first mead of 2021.  Generally we lay down one or two batches a year, largely because we are terrible at pulling them and bottling them, and it's just as easy to pull mead into a glass from a dipper as it is to pull it off into bottles. The basic recipe for all of our meads is three parts water to one part honey, with two cups of brewer's yeast slurry divided between two pots of four gallons each.  Typically we do one pot plain and one pot not-plain; last not-plain was orange chai, the not-plain before that was cranberry, and this one's orange ginger.  We used approximately a pound of fresh ginger, peeled and cubed, six large juice oranges, peeled and sliced, and about two ounces of orange zest peeled off the oranges.  It will be consumable in about March, and it will be ready for bottling between March and June, at which time we may start another batch - or we may just forget to bottle it, as we've done occasionally before. Basic steps: 1. Gat...