Nettles: Metheglin

I had a quart of nettles leftover from that last round of foraging. What to do with them? As so often happens, my thoughts turned to alcohol...

You can make beer with nettles. In fact, it's been used as a flavoring for centuries, if not thousands of years. In ages past it was used in place of hops in Gruits, and in all kinds of teas and tinctures. More recently, H.F.W. over at River Cottage in England has revived interest with a recipe for Nettle Beer, that really is more of a "Country Wine" than a beer. I thought about making it, but ultimately decided against. I already had something ready to go. And I wanted something for St. Patty's, which was rapidly approaching.

Mead.

I would make a Nettle-Spice Metheglin.

"What the hell is a Metheglin?", I hear the Interwebs scream. Metheglin is simply the traditional word for spiced mead. Traditionally, people would put all kinds of things into mead as a folk cure. One, because the honey and alcohol made it taste better and two, the alcohol and steeping allows extraction of various compounds that aren't soluble in water. Also, in medieval times, your local water probably had a lot to do with why you were sick in the first place and did not usually end up as a chief ingredient in any effective 'cures'. So we get the word Metheglin, from the Welsh for 'Healing Liquor'. The astute among you will have noticed that "Metheglin" sounds a lot like "Medicine". Well there you go. Now drink your metheglin! Is good for you.

I had a spare half-gallon growler of mead from last Fall's Purple Daze Melomel. You can see the growler in the back of the big carboy. The main batch is still sitting pretty there on the fruit, by the way. Seven months and counting. It's going to be so good. In 2013.

So step one was to make an infusion to blend in with the mead.

Into a pot with a quart of water went:

• 1 quart of Nettles, blanched (about 3 quarts raw Nettles).

Boiled it for 45 minutes. Then added the spices.

• Peel of one Satsuma, all white pith removed
• Peel of one Meyer Lemon, pith removed
• two coins Galangal
• two coins Ginger
• one nutmeg, quartered
• one cardamom pod, smacked with the flat of a knife
• two dozen allspice berries
• one kaffir lime leaf
  
• 1/4 oz hops. Sterling. In a tea ball, because they were pellets and I didn't want them getting everywhere.

Boil for another 15 minutes. Then strain and cool.

This was a lot of uncharted territory. I wasn't quite sure what the nettles would taste like, or which spices would dominate. So I got to blending. For blending you'll want:

• spare honey to back sweeten if necessary
• the zest-less lemon and satsuma
• acid blend, and sulfites/sorbates if you're going for long term storage. I wasn't.
• A good blending vessel.

Here's my setup.

You can see I carefully decanted the mead into a pitcher. The nettle mixture is on the left, looking like swamp water. Then it just became a matter of blending. A little of this, a little of that. The mead was on the sweet side, so no backsweetening was necessary. A little bit of the citrus juices really brightened it up. I used most of the nettle extract. Subtlety is nice in theory, but if you can't taste the spice it's not a spiced beer/mead. Let the spiced speak, but not shout.

Then it was just a matter of bottling. I figured that some yeast got in from the mead, and sure enough, a week by the heating register and it was 'petillant'. Which is, easily, my least favorite word in all of brewing. But a little carbonation helps in spiced meads, if lifts aromas up to the nose.

So what did it taste like? Quite good, I think. Nettles taste like spinach when just cooked, but boil them for an hour and they change dramatically. The best I can describe it as is arrowroot. Kind of bready and sweet. Weird. The citrus and spices worked out well. Nutmeg goes great with nettles. As expected, the cardamom is there, shouting above the din. One is certainly enough. The ginger and galangal were subtle, but in the background.

Unfortunately, the spice infusion was very turbid. And the resulting mead was a bit cloudy. Tasted fine, but was a bit unappealing visually. (Though I was actually hoping it would turn bright green!) As a result it didn't place when I sent a couple bottles up to the Cascade Brewers Cup.

Nevertheless, it did take Honorable Mention in the Mead Best of Show Round, out of over 60 meads. The crowd loved it too. Well, those lucky few that got to taste the last two bottles anyway. Honestly, a week or two would have settled it out.

Oh well. Next time...

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Brewday: Purple Daze '09

So I normally make one batch of mead a year. Usually this is 8-10 gallons, and fermented in the big 12 gallon Pyrex carboy I, erm, acquired. This year I decided to combine our summer foraging with meadmaking and make a big multi-berry melomel. It's based on a recipe from Ken Shram's excellent The Compleat Meadmaker, which all meadmakers should own at least one copy of. My plan is to make a 10ish gallon batch and split it. Half will be treated like a red wine, oaked, maybe malolactic, etc. The other half will be sweetened to various levels and bottled more like a berry melomel. All of it will get a year before we start drinking it.

It all began with Meredith and I picking berries. And more berries. And more berries. (This should be called Discovery Park Mountain Lion Memorial Melomel, but I digress.) The berries were frozen on cookie sheets, bagged, and shoved in the back of the freezer all Summer. Supplemented with berries from the farmer's market, whatever was in season. Finally, some things came from Remlinger Farms out in Carnation. (I missed strawberry and pie cherry season due to the Bar Exam.) You can find frozen berries from them, in 3lb form, at T&C markets in Seattle.

I also had to find honey. In Miami, we had the serious hookup. A nearby honey wholesaler (and professional Fireworks company, if you can believe it) would sell me a gallon of Orange Blossom for $25. Weeeeell those days are over. I got a gallon of Blackberry honey from Bob's, but that cleared him out and I needed another gallon. Hmm, what to do?

I picked up a gallon of cheap spring water, then headed over to the Ballard Market. Poured my gallon of water on a thirsty looking parking lot tree, then headed inside. They sell bulk clover and orange honey there, with some dinky little tubs to put it in. Well I turned on the tap, and set my jug down. Checked out the teas and coffee, checked jug. Checked out bulk spices aisle, checked jug. Wandered fruit aisle, checked jug. Took a nap, checked jug. Recited Epic Poem of Gilgamesh, checked jug. A lifetime later I had a gallon of orange honey. Slapped a label on it and presented to confused checkout clerk. Total cost of both, nearly $100. Ouch. Plus fruit. Ouch. At least the blackberries were free (discounting bloodloss and stinging nettle).

Purple Daze Berry Melomel 2009

10 gallons. Ish. Probably. Somewhere near 50 wine bottles. ABV somewhere around 11-12%

12 lbs (1 gallon) Blackberry Honey
12 lbs (1 gallon) Orange Blossom Honey
4 t Yeast Nutrient
4 t Yeast Energizer
4 packets Lalvin Narbonne yeast

7 lbs Wild Blackberries
4 lbs Blueberries
1 lb Wild Huckleberries
2 lbs Bing Cherries, halved with pits still in.
3 lbs Pie Cherries, pitted
3 lbs Raspberries
6 lbs Strawberries

Mead is really, really, stupidly easy to make. Honey + water = alcohol. Wild yeast will be enough to do the trick, but if you want to make something more... palatable, then you need yeast and yeast nutrient. Here's the process. Should take maybe 20 minutes. 1 gallon honey goes into a sanitized carboy. 1 gallon hot water goes into the carboy. 2 tsp yeast nutrient and 2 tsp yeast energizer goes into the carboy. Swirl the bajeezus out of it until honey is fairly diluted. Add two to three more gallons water to it. Again, swirl bajeezus. The less water you add, the stronger and possibly sweeter it will be. Reconstitute two packets dry wine yeast (I like Lalvin Narbonne) and add to carboy. Done. Let 'er rip. Now do another carboy full. Let ferment for two weeks at 66-70ish.

The fruit. First, freeze all of it. Then thaw all of it. Since there were a lot of berries, 26 pounds, it was taking a while to thaw them. So I put them all in one of my brew buckets. I added some pectic enzyme (maybe a tablespoon, keep the haze down). I then added 10 crushed campden tablets. This added sulfites equivalent to 41ish ppm, which is a bit less than you'd start a red wine out at. But I don't usually sulfite my meads till the very end anyway so this is more than I would normally add for just a mead. Give it 24 hours, then sanitize the big 12 gallon carboy, add the fruit and rack the mead onto it.

Or better yet, rack just ONE of the carboyfulls onto it. Turns out I'd made a bit too much base mead. The fruit took up 3 gallons of space. I'd made 10 gallons of mead. In retrospect I should have made 8 gallons of stronger mead. So I had to cram the leftovers into hastily sanitized spare growlers. They'll come back later when it's time to blend and make up for volume lost to racking. But the carboy was nearly full. And this worried me a bit. And rightly so.

I came back to check it a couple hours later and discovered that the CO2 from the renewed fermentation was floating the berries like a raft, and the whole thing threatened to explode like a 4th grade science fair volcano. I quickly sanitized a carboy and the autosiphon and racked 2 gallons or so of the mead over to the carboy. Whew. Crisis averted. Purple stained hands and a sticky berry mess to clean up at 9:30 at night. W00t. So yeah, add just one carboy full and wait for the fermentation to calm down before adding the other.

Otherwise there it will sit for about 3 months. Then I'll rack, let it sit, then rack again probably. Bottling will be next Spring sometime.

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Pectin: my most hated of all polysaccharides

Last week we bottled this year's meads. We ended up with about three and a half gallons each of traditional Still Sweet Orange Blossom Mead and Jackfruit Melomel. Both are quite good, but the filtering of the Jackfruit was horrendous. The problem: pectin. Jackfruit is loaded with it.

For those of you unfamiliar with it, Jackfruit is a giant, spiky south Asian fruit related to breadfruit and durian. It tastes kinda like funky bananas and pineapple, is incredibly resinous and sticky to peel, and is loaded with kidney bean sized seeds (which can be cooked in curries, fried or salted and roasted!). I got my hands on about 10 lbs of raw jackfruit from a local farm, not even a whole one as the individual fruits can be upwards of 60 lbs. It took probably two hours to peel...ugh. Then I racked 4 gallons of mead onto it, added pectic enzyme, and let sit for a month or so.

Some people really go au naturale on their meads, adding water, honey, yeast and nothing else. Not me. Yeah the Vikings may have mixed honey and water in a barrel, spit in it for good luck and left it to ferment as it wanted, but not me. If figure if you can use it in wine, you can use it in mead. So I add yeast nutrient, fining agents, acid blend, sorbates and sulfites, and filtering as necessary to make something great come out in the end. However, patience is still a virtue.

Well after all the waiting, racking, waiting, sparkaloid, waiting, sulfites and sorbate, and more waiting, it was fairly cleared. But there was still some sediment and more importantly, pectic haze. Thanks a lot, pectic enzyme.

So into the filter it went!

I use a gravity fed vin-brite filter for my wines and meads, and while it works very well if things have been fined and given plenty of time to clear, it didn't fare so well against the jackfruit. I expected it might take 45 minutes or an hour...

It took eighteen hours.

Here's a photo or the carboy perched precariously on a chair for some extra gravity. I decided to just leave it to filter overnight, as it was barely going. By the next evening I was able to bottle it, blended with some of the sweet mead to balance its acidity and final gravity of about 0.996.

Obviously there are some oxidization concerns. Normally I would be worried, but these bottles won't last more than a few months anyway, and there is some ascorbic acid in the acid blend I added to taste before they went into the bottles.

The verdict? They are both still quite young, but are very good meads already. The jackfruit really comes through in the nose, and gives it a Chardonnay character in the flavor. The sweet mead is nice, you can really taste the honey, and the honey aromas are still around. The final gravity was about 1.022 so it's sweet but not cloying. Both have very nice color and clarity.

I ended up with 30 wine bottles and 8 smaller beer bottles for competition. The sweet mead got gold foil, jackfruit silver. Some of these will get special labels and end up as presents, most will just be enjoyed by us! Total cost: about $2.50 a bottle I'd guestimate. Plus hours of labor and months of waiting...

So here's some Tips For Mead:

• Don't heat the honey. Just add one gallon of honey (I like Orange Blossom because I can get a gallon for about $25 around here!) and top up to 4 gallons total. Swirl and mix as best you can, either in the carboy or in a pot with a whisk. Add some yeast nutrient (a couple teaspoons) and your yeast and you're good to go.
  
• Sanitization. Cleanliness is next to godliness. That said, honey is pretty resilient stuff. Don't stress too much.
• Add fruit into the secondary. If you want, you can freeze it first which kills off some of the nasty bugs and more importantly causes the fruit cells to rupture, meaning more fruit flavor and aroma. You can use campden tablets to sanitize the fruit must if you wish. The slower fermentation in the secondary will not blow off nearly so much of the aromas, whereas if you put it in in the beginning you risk messy explosive blowoff and loss of flavor and aroma.
  
• Add acid blend. It really helps round out the flavor, making your mead less of a one trick pony. If you add acid blend at the beginning, which can help the yeast, go easy. I say 'can', because yeast do like an acidic home, but honey is acidic, and some honeys are more acidic than others. I have had a fermentation get stuck because the PH dropped too low... Try 1/4 tsp for 4 gallons. You can always add, but you can't take it away. Then add to taste at bottling. I only put about a half teaspoon total in these.
• Patience. Let it clear before bottling. This could take 6 months to a year. If you use bentonite or sparkaloid, mix it in very well then wait at least a week.
• You can always sweeten to taste at bottling. Just be sure fermentation is done, and consider adding sulfites and sorbate to keep fermentation from starting up again.
• Bottling. Move your carboy to where you're going to rack from at least a day before you plan to bottle. This applies to wine too. It's amazing how those sediments shoot up into suspension. Then rack into another carboy or bucket to get it off the lees. Then you can filter if you wish, or don't bother.
• If you're going to make it sparkling or petilent (a little bubbly) use beer bottles and bottlecaps. Otherwise your corks will shoot out. If you aren't down with sulfites, use bottlecaps in case you get a restarted fermentation in the bottle.

For more info check out Ken Schramm's The Complete Meadmaker, a great book which I've found very helpful.

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