Slow Booze & the new Glass Carboy
The last twelve months have seen me draw away from mainstream liquor outlets and back towards a slow booze attitude. I began fermenting my own mead – a honey wine, the world’s oldest alcoholic beverage dating back to 7000 BC – in the second half of 2010 with a plain mead recipe handed over from my friend Eileen Eaton.
A 5 litre glass demijohn costs around $12.50 so it’s not a big investment if you’re interested in fermenting mead. All you need are the very basic ingredients, a bottle for fermentation (with bung and airlock) and a place to leave it happily bubbling away in the background. In my world that equated to a solid desk in my office.
I prefer the sweeter meads (sometimes refered to as dessert meads) that tend towards 2KG of honey for a 5 litre batch. Dryer meads have far less at around 1.3KG of honey. You should probably note that the more honey in there then the more fuel for your yeast to convert to alcohol. My sweeter meads have been more potent.
The second sweet mead that came out of my office was a beautiful orange, cinnamon and currant mead (orange melomel) that was absolutely gorgeous. The oranges provide a rich golden brown to the translucent liquid and it was thick like a syrup in the glass. I used a dash of Schweppes lemonade in the drinking glass to make it even more palatable. Mead, after all, can often be an ‘acquired taste’ for the drinker.
The addiction to slow booze is the enjoyment of making but also the completion of drinking. Mead should be bottled for at least three months before drinking but the best I’ve acheived to date would be about six weeks until the empties were back in our kitchen sink.
After purchasing several more 5 litre glass demijohns I created a few mediocre dry meads with lower honey that were drinkable but not as potent or gallant to the eye. They were disposed of in short order (hiccup and movie memories) to free the bottles for the next phase.
- I have a plain mead brewing that is about three weeks from first racking;
- a two thirds full orange, cinnamon and currant mead was re-fermented with new honey and another orange – I’m waiting for that experiment to stop bubbling in the airlock;
- two more demijohns were brewed using a basic mead recipe with the addition of 400 ml and 1 litre respectively of a local organic pulped apple juice. If they were a true cyser they would be honey added to apple juice without any water (therefore these two would be apple melomels not cyser); and
- another orange, cinnamon and currant mead that is very near it’s first racking after 2 months fermentation.
So currently I have 5 x 5 litre demijohns of mead fermenting with a spare 5 litre demijohn for racking (decanting off the sediment). I’ve also purchased a larger 23 litre glass carboy that I plan to use for another orange, cinnamon and currant mead next week. That will eventually free up my smaller bottles for racking that big carboy. In turn, it means I’ll be able to turn around production faster because the 23 litre carboy can be repurposed with a brand new mead after the first racking (usually 4-6 weeks).
I have an ambition rolling in my head at the moment to explore some braggot – a welsh malt mead that may optionally include hops and borders on a dark beer. If there is more honey than malt then it’s a braggot… otherwise it’s a beer. However, I have to learn a little about that beer making process before I can jump onto that concoction.
Slow booze has a way of changing how you look at alcohol in the same way cooking your own food makes you rethink your philosophy to mass produced fast food outlets. While I still enjoy a good whiskey if it’s provided or a boutique beer, I do appreciate creating, nurturing and consuming something made from local products with my very own hands in the kitchen.
You can have far worse vices than appreciating the (rare-hangover) gift of the humble old honey bees – it’s about maintaining a connection to 9000 years of human experience with alcohol. If you’re interested, I wrote a few months ago about two niche mead opportunities begging for someone to enter the Tasmanian market… however, be aware that Australian wine exports have been dramatically falling as has Australian beer consumption in the last year. But, if you’re interested, there are a couple of good ideas to run with – good luck.
This adventure in my life called slow booze all comes back to one cold winter’s day last year when Hartzview Vineyard called me aside and offered up two shots of warmed mead. Done well, mead is a largely untapped market. Well worth looking into as a venture.
