Peach Melomel

For a couple of years, I have followed home winemaking posts about small batches of melomels. A melomel is simply a mead amended with some kind of fruit. You can use any kind of fruit you want. The resulting mead will have a mix of honey and fruit flavours.

I had some good honey leftover from the most recent batch of mead, and we had some fresh fruit from British Columbia, including some very juicy, perhaps even overripe, peaches. This presented an opportunity to try making a peach melomel, which struck me as a potentially nice combination.

Here's the recipe I used:

- 10 L of filtered water
- 3 campden tablets
- 2 tsp yeast nutrient
- 1 tsp peptic enzyme
- approximately 3 kg honey
- 1 cup of sugar*
- 11 pitted peaches, sliced
- packet of Lalvin EC1118 yeast

*Sugar was needed because the dissolved honey only gave s.g. = 1.078. The sugar brought up the s.g. to 1.086.

After mixing up all the ingredients except fruit and yeast in my primary fermentation bucket, I put the peaches in a nylon straining bag, tied it off, and squeezed the peach juices into the must. The amount of peach juice was surprising. I put the whole bag of strained peaches into the must and let it sit for 36 hours. After removing the bag, I sprinkled yeast on the surface. A few hours later, fermentation was going strong.

Fermentation "head" on the peach melomel

After six days of primary fermentation, the 'head' had collapsed, and s.g. = 1.024. I transferred to a sterilized 3 gallon carboy for secondary fermentation.

Peach Melomel in Secondary.

Unfortunately, these pics don't really show the subtle peachy colour of this melomel. I'm looking forward to seeing how the colour turns out after it's aged, clarified, and bottled.

Beeswax?

Back to the mead...

Four weeks ago, I racked the mead into a carboy, to allow secondary fermentation to proceed, which it did. Fermentation was more or less over a couple of weeks ago Tonight, I decided it was time to rack the mead into a clean carboy so the mead can bulk-age, lose CO₂, and clear up.

During secondary fermentation, there was a small froth on the surface, which isn't a big deal. However, as fermentation slowed down, a fine, beige solid remained on the surface of the mead, and along the inside, top surface of the glass, under the neck. The solid never dissolved.

Beeswax?

After racking, I managed to swipe my finger into the dirty, empty carbon, and get some of this material. It was granular, hard, but seemed a bit 'gummy', like paraffin wax. Question for honey and mead people: Is this beeswax?

This particular honey is not heavily processed. I used 2-3 kg of honey, so it wouldn't be a surprise if there was a small amount of beeswax in there.

Sadly, before I could measure specific gravity, I dropped my hydrometer on the floor. So, I cannot estimate alcohol content of the mead right now.

The mead sure tasted good, though. I was surprised by the sweetness. Fermentation was OVER. There shouldn't be any residual sugar in there. It could be that there are other sugars (e.g. pentoses or something like that) that the yeast did not touch. This deserves some research. Question for honey people: what types of sugar are present in honey? 

Mead v.2

My first attempt at mead left me unsatisfied. Looking back, there were three things that I did incorrectly:

1. Failed to add yeast nutrient. Honey does not have the range of minerals and other nutrients that yeast require. Fermentation only really started once I added the yeast nutrient. Further, all of my  fussing around to get fermentation started would have introduced unwanted oxygen, which would have led to undesirable compounds that affect taste.
2. Starting specific gravity was too high at the beginning (1.120) and the end (1.019) of fermentation.This gave a mead that was sweet, heavy, and very alcoholic. The balance of taste wasn't right (and still isn't!).
3. Honey quality. A friend from my undergraduate days at university now runs a honey business, and she pointed out that Costco honey is rubbish - if I want to make good mead, I need to start with quality honey. ("Okay. Point taken.")

So, it is now over two years after my first attempt at mead, and I finally got around to my second attempt. This time, I'm not making any of the mistakes I made the first time.

We have a great farmers market in St. Albert, and there are always three or four honey producers there. My wife and I went shopping one Saturday morning and obtained 7 kg of unpasteurized, local honey for $50. The vendor was Good Morning Honey Ltd.

Mead recipe:

3 Campden tablets
2 tsp yeast nutrient
10 L distilled water
Honey
1 packet of Lalvin EC-1118 yeast

Campden tablets and yeast nutrient were added to the water in the sterilized primary (bucket). Honey was added, with stirring, until s.g. = 1.088. After 24 hours, the yeast was hydrated and added to the must. Fermentation bubbles were observed within one hour of pitching the yeast.

After four days in the primary, s.g. = 1.065. I decided to rack the mead to a carboy. Fermentation has continued since then (6 days ago).

Mead, after racking to carboy.

I think most chemists will know what I'm talking about when I describe this fermentation as "clean". What I mean is this: when chemists conduct a chemical reaction the lab, especially when they are trying to synthesize a compound, they strive for a "clean" reaction. A clean reaction is something we recognize easily from the absence of unwanted precipitates, the absence of guck on the sides of reaction flasks, the relative transparency of solutions, and colours that you want to see (e.g. you don't want to see your mixture turn brown when the product you want is colourless). These are simply physical clues that a reaction is going right.

This mead has been "clean" from the beginning: the colour hasn't changed, the liquid is as transparent as you could expect if there were only little bits of yeast and bubbles that were scattering light. You can tell that clarification is going to be a snap. And, there was hardly any foaming, which suggests a very pure honey (i.e. no surfactants of any kind - natural or artificial).

The plan is to let this mead ferment all the way to dryness and then I will rack it and let it bulk age in a carboy for a couple of months. I'm looking forward to enjoying some of this mead over the Christmas holidays.