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.