A Tiger Barn Cattery Wine Recipe
The reality is that honey isn't cheap, but if you can make a country wine then you can make a mead. You'll just be cooking the honey in water rather than adding pounds of sugar … and you save a lot of time picking fruit!
1 Lb of Blackberries (Lovington)
1.5 pints of boiling water
Pasturized Honey Water (2.5 Lbs of Honey in 2.5 pints of water)
1 litre of Aldi's Del Oro Red grape juice (For body & tannin)
1 tsp pectic enzyme
1 tsp citric acid
2 tsp of TronOzymol
Lalvin KV1116
Crushed campden tablets
When all the ingredients are in only add as much honey water as you need to reach an SG of say 1.080 - 1.085 and that will almost guarantee a dry ferment at 12%.
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Next year we'll be keeping our own bees, but for now our local beekeeper who keeps his cats here donated 20 Lbs to the cause in exchange for a bottle from every batch. I've always loved meads and this was the right time to experiment … Little did I know then, but from now on it turned out that I'd just be concentrating on meads and port style wines.
A Melomel is any Honey wine flavoured or coloured with fruit, for me it's the most common wine I make now. Hippocrass are vanilla & herb meads named after the father of medicine - Hypocrates. Pyment is the name given to a wine fermented with grapes and honey drunk in Roman times and a Cyser is the name given to fermented apple juice with cherries. It's a similar naming convention to say an Acerglyn, which would use Maple syrup (Acer is a Maple tree) instead of honey and say a Metheglyn which would be fermented with Honey and spices.
I'd let the brambles stay just to see if they would produce a lot of berries … the following year I cut them down and have been fighting a war with them ever since - It's better picking around fields, roadsides and near railway lines! Still, these are genuine homegrown Lovington blackberries.
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Monday 21st October 2012
1 Lb of Blackberries
1.5 pints of boiling water
1 crushed campden tablet
Tuesday 22nd October 2012
Added Pasturized Honey Water (2.5 Lbs of Honey)
1 litre of Aldi's Del Oro Red grape juice (For body & tannin)
1 tsp pectic enzyme
1 tsp citric acid
Add honey water to reach SG: 1.080
2 tsp of TronOzymol
Pitch in Lalvin KV1116
Thursday 25th October 2012
Strained Blackberry pulp out
SG: 1.012 (Drop of 68)
Added Honey Water
SG: 1.020 (+8)
Friday 26th October 2012
SG: 1.002 (Drop of 18)
Strained into demijohn added honey water and put in the utility room.
SG: 1.012 (+10)
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18th January 2013
1st Rack
Added Campden tablet
SG: 0.994 (Drop of 18)
68 + 18 + 18 / 7.4 = 14%
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Saturday 31st August
2nd Rack
SG: 0.992 (Drop of 2)
68 + 18 + 18 + 2 / 7.4 = 14.3%
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Saturday 28th September 2013
Back Sweetened to SG: 1.004 Dry
Dry: 0.990 – 1.006 Medium: 1.006 – 1.012 Sweet: 1.012 – 1.020 Dessert: 1.020+
Bottled: Wednesday May 14th 2014
5x for us, 1 for Chris the beekeeper
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