I just received this very impressive sample kit from the Oak Solutions Group. There’s a lot to experiment with: different types of oak, in different forms, with different levels of toast. I hope to be trying it all out, and writing about it, over the next year. To get one for yourself, follow this link, fill out the form, and select which samples you would like. They ask what company you work for and your title, but I just wrote in “Home Wine Maker.”
Time to experiment!
The wine has fermented out, been racked, and is patiently aging in the basement. The winemaker, on the other hand, is not so patient. It isn’t brilliantly clear, but its flavor and aroma he’s interested in, so he bottles. The trouble with this approach is that a wine that isn’t clear has something in suspension, and it’s not going to stop settling just because a cork went into the bottle and a nice label got glued to the side.
What happens when you bottle too soon?
What sorts of things might settle out? It might be something harmless, like cream of tartar. It might be fruit solids. In the case of my 2006 Apple Wine it was yeast. I rushed it into bottles in December 2006, just two months after fermentation began. It was still and dry when I bottled, so there was never a question of fermentation pressurizing the bottles. But yeast went dormant in the bottles, settled out, and began to decay.
Good looking wine: More than just a pretty face
That doesn’t make for good flavor, which is why the bottle I opened last night failed to deliver on the promise I saw in it early on. I usually work to make clear wine because I appreciate how it looks in the glass, but I learned last night that lack of clarity can be more than an aesthetic problem.
The National Weather Service’s Climate Prediction Center has an explanation for cool weather I noticed in March. When the eastern Pacific Ocean cools, called La Nina, it affects local climates in predictable ways. Here in Washington State it brings cool, wet weather. Since the CPC expects La Nina to continue into April, it looks like we’re in for another month of cold, rainy weather.
This is not what I expect my backyard to look like in Spring! I start paying close attention to the weather this time of year, because I’m starting my garden and a lot of what I grow will end up in a primary fermenter. How’s the weather looking thus far? It felt cold to me in March, and a quick check of temperature data confirmed that we’re off to a cold start. The average high temperature was 3.48°F (1.93°C) below normal and the average low 0.58°F (0.32°C) cooler. Most of my fruit trees are beginning to stir, and I’m worried about a late frost.
I mentioned this one yesterday, when I was commenting on existing wine and mead recipes that used chocolate. Here it is in its entirety:
Chocolate Mead aka Liquid Sex Mead
Lord Rhys, Capten gen y Arian Lloer, Barony of Andelcrag, Midrealm
This recipe may be quoted, borrowed, copied, or stolen by anyone under three conditions.
1. As the originator of this recipe please offer me credit as such.
2. No money may change hands specifically for this recipe. Give it freely to any who ask in the spirit in which I give it to you.
3. It may be put into any SCA newsletter, SCA publication, or website, paid subscription or public domain only after due notification to the originator.
WARNING! WARNING! WARNING!
The originator of the recipe is not responsible for hordes of chocolate-crazed women attacking your encampment in search of chocolate mead, or Foreign Royalty sending knights to drag you into their court at Pennsic to demand bottles and recipes. All local women must now see my lady, Angelline la Petita, for a sample if you can talk her out of it. I am not allowed to carry around an open bottle anymore.
Basic Procedure
The basics of mead brewing should be mastered before performing any advanced projects. This recipe assumes a standard 5 gallon batch of mead using a 4 parts water to 1 part honey mixture (Must). – editor’s note: take a look at my Simple Mead Recipe for an introduction to mead making basics.
If you prefer your mead boiled, do so before adding any cocoa from this recipe as the foaming will remove the chocolate from the mix. Boiling is optional in mead and if you would like the pro’s and con’s, please ask. I personally boil nothing in mead making.
To your standard must, before adding the yeast, add 16 oz of Cocoa Powder (Nestles works great). Mix well before adding yeast. You will notice a lag in the start of the yeast; however this is common and due to the oils in cocoa. It will start bubbling madly in a few days, but never as much as normal mead.
Finishing and Aging
THIS STEP IS VERY VERY VERY IMPORTANT!
Cocoa contains a number of different very bitter oils that must be given time to break down. After the bubbling slows down put your fermenter/carboy away for one full year. Keeping the airlock on and checking the water level in it on occasion. Any other method of removing the oils will result in the loss of that little enzyme that the ladies are so fond of.
At the end of that year, rack the mead once to remove sediment and sweeten to approx. 1.030 on a hydrometer (semi-sweet) or to taste. I use Camden to kill the yeast at this point. Put the mead away for a second year. After the second year bottle normally. It will be clear, but very dark.
Some production notes: This mead leaves a very light aftertaste of chocolate that many people will not be able to identify readily. However the other effects of chocolate, i.e. orgasmic like pleasure is there. In the original test one of the samplers didn’t care for it, only one identified the flavor and tried to steal the bottle, and the other 28 thought it good with comments ranging from “very good” to “OH MY GOD!”. I make five gallons each year to share with friends, and that is all due to space from brewing. I used an apple flower honey, but any light honey should work. Just avoid heavy flavored honeys that might overpower the chocolate. In addition brew down only once, a heroic (high alcohol) mead would likewise overpower the delicate flavor.
Additional Note: The current batch now aged over two years has increased in chocolate flavor and smoothed very very very well. I no longer serve chocolate mead at less then two years of age. The Ladies of the Barony deserve nothing less then the best.
Final Note: If you let the mead age a third year some lovely Lady will force you to marry her in order to hoard the supply. My Lady Angelline has even received copies of this recipe in email, telling her she just has to try this out.
This mead is best served to the one you love ice cold, in candlelight, with a bowl of fresh strawberries for dipping. And privacy would be recommended.
Comments back to me are most welcome and maybe sent to LordRhys@gmail.com
I discussed two possible styles of chocolate wine, in my most recent post on the subject, and did a little thinking out loud about how much chocolate I might use in each one. I’ve been searching for existing recipes, since then, to see how other people have approached it. There aren’t many, but I found a few mead recipes. There was pretty broad agreement on using between 3 and 4 oz of cocoa per gallon of must (22 – 30 g/L). This agrees with the 3 oz/gallon that I arrived at in my previous chocolate wine posting. One outlier, “Love Potion #9,” called for 8 oz/gallon (60 g/L) and 4-6 drops of vanilla extract. One recipe that kept coming up in my searches, it looks like a proven one that’s all over the internet, is Lord Rhys Chocolate Mead. This one calls for 3.2 oz/gallon (90 g/L) of cocoa and one part honey to four parts water.
An aspect I hadn’t considered: Chocolate as an aphrodisiac
I contacted the author of this famous chocolate mead, and he insisted on using cocoa over other forms of chocolate. We both came to the same conclusion about baking chocolate, that it was essentially cocoa plus cocoa butter. Since the cocoa butter is insoluble and doesn’t add anything, cocoa or extract make better choices. I had been leaning towards extract, but his explanation for preferring cocoa got me thinking,
Chocolate extract is basically the essence of the flavor extracted with alcohol, you get the flavor, but not the enzymes that make chocolate excite the endorphines.
I should mention that he subtitled his recipe “liquid sex,” and included warnings about attracting “hordes of chocolate-crazed women.” Well, my whole chocolate winemaking adventure began when I thought about making a wine for Valentine’s Day …
Chocolate extract: Less is more?
Larry Paterson, a Canadian winemaker who goes by the nickname “little fat wino,” has done some extensive work on chocolate in wine. He is just as convinced as Lord Rhys is about cocoa, that chocolate extract is the only way to go,
it manages well, doesn’t complicate issues by adding fat to the wine, filters cleanly, leaves a clean flavour and in my experience doesn’t cause any bad effects
Those are all excellent reasons, and he is very persuasive. No hordes of crazed women, though, so I’ll have to give this some thought.
Don’t miss future articles on chocolate wine
I think I have enough information to put together a recipe using cocoa, but I don’t have a good idea of how much extract to use. So as I continue this series, I’ll do some research on chocolate extract. Later, I’ll formulate some recipes with extract and cocoa. To make sure you don’t miss any of it, subscribe to this blog. It’s free and easy, and you’ll get every article without having to keep checking back.
Have you made chocolate wine or mead? Do you have ideas on how to make it? Let me know by leaving a comment!
I’ve written about Olympic Cellars before. They’re the winery being threatened by the United State Olympic Committee for using the word “Olympic” in their name. They also make a cranberry wine. Well the Lady of the House and I have recently tried some of their wine, and the Dungeness Red (a 2004 Lemberger) really stands out. It has enough of a tannic bite, an astringency that tastes a little bitter makes your mouth feel a little dry, to make the wine interesting without being harsh. There’s a complexity to it that makes the first sip a pleasant surprise.
What do I mean by “complexity?” I mean the opposite of some of those simple bland wines that we’ve all had. You know the ones – you taste them, and there’s nothing at all wrong. They’re not to sweet. Not to harsh. They don’t taste bad. But there’s nothing right with them either. They’re one dimensional and boring. Well, when I say the Dungeness Red is complex, I mean the opposite of that.
I’m not trying to be vague and imprecise, I’m just trying to describe the wine without resorting to phrases like, “bright cherry notes and a bit of spice.” Maybe I should just say that it’s a red table wine that’s a cut above the others in it’s price range. If you’re grilling a steak or digging in to pasta, this wine will liven up your meal and is worth much more than the $12 we paid for it.
I’ve been discussing the effects of processing on honey with commenters Eric and Dick Adams. You can check it out for yourself here. Liquid honey that you buy has been processed by the beekeeper and possibly by a packer. Knowing what they do and why can help us understand how it affects our honey and our mead.
Filtering: Why and how
Filtering honey can solve some problems, and which problems you want to solve dictate how you might filter. Honey from the comb can have a lot of debris in it, like wax, propolis (something bees use like cement or caulk), or bits of dead bee. Even the most anti-processing die hards wont be happy to find a dead insect on their toast, so removing them and making honey aesthetically pleasing is a goal shared by almost everyone involved in selling honey. This sort of coarse filtering might be no more sophisticated than a large section of cheesecloth.
Another problem that beekeepers or packers might wish to solve is crystallization. Partially crystallized honey can invite spoilage. As honey crystallizes, it loses moisture to the surrounding honey. If the moisture content of this honey rises above 19% water then some of the wild yeast naturally present in honey will go to work, and you won’t like the result: off flavors and acetic acid. Crystals form when nuclei, like a bit of dust, pollen, or anything of the right size, are available. So, filtering these nuclei can delay or prevent crystallization.
A finer degree of filtering, called ultrafiltration, can produce an even cleaner purer product. Some commercial meaderies use ultrafiltered honey because the resulting mead is drinkable much sooner than mead from ordinary honey.
Heat: Another problem solver
Heating honey liquefies any crystals in it and destroys some potential nuclei for crystallization. Enough heat for enough time (180F for about a minute) can pasteurize honey, killing wild yeasts. A low level of heat can also help honey flow. In fact, a lot of modern bottling equipment requires some heat to operate.
Too much of a good thing?
Anything can be overdone. Some amount of filtration can remove contaminants and improve the honey, but taking this too far can strip out “contaminants” that make honey what it is. How much is too much? I have a hunch, but don’t know for sure, that ultrafiltration goes too far. I’d love to take a batch of honey, ultrafilter part of it, and compare the two. Since I can’t do that, I follow the “no more than necessary” rule. When I buy honey, I don’t want to pay for wax or bits of hive, just honey. That means I want just enough filtration to remove foreign matter, but no more.
The same goes for heat. Beehives get hot in the summer, and so does the honey stored in them. So there’s not much point in insisting that honey not be heated at all. I prefer “raw” honey, which is never heated above 120F. This allows for easy bottling, but doesn’t pasteurize. I can’t say that pasteurization harms the honey, in fact I’ve boiled the honey-water mixture in some of my meads without noticing any ill effects, but I don’t think there’s much benefit.
As I continue this series on honey, I plan to talk about the effects of age and how important “freshness” is. I’ll also take another stab at that always touchy subject of buying honey from beekeepers or packers/wholesalers. You may want to subscribe to this blog. It’s the free and easy way to make sure you don’t miss an article without having to keep checking back manually.
Julian Schultz at the Oxford Wine Room has endured a lot of friendly, and not so friendly, needling to tell us about freezing wine. Not only can an opened bottle, that would otherwise be ruined by oxidation, be preserved by freezing, it will be improved by freezing. And vigorous shaking. I’m not making this up, and I don’t think he is either. His story starts almost two decades ago, with a particularly good bottle of wine that he couldn’t finish before an overseas trip. In the freezer it went. A month later, he thawed it out and noticed that the wine had stratified. After some energetic shaking, the wine was whole again, and though the color had faded it tasted much better than it did before. He’s since repeated this experiment and now freezes wine regularly. He’s even won over some skeptical friends.
I first came across this story by reading it on Jack Keller’s blog. It’s hard for me to imagine anyone interested in making wine or mead at home who hasn’t heard of Mr. Keller, but if you haven’t you should bookmark his site right away. He’s got the largest collection of wine recipes on the internet, and I think of him as the Dean of home wine makers. He tried Mr. Schultz’s freezing method and got the same result. For all his expertise, he’s also got a wry sense of humor (they both do, as a matter of fact), so I’m torn between the trust that he has rightly earned and the very close resemblance of this wine freezing idea to the perfect practical joke. This is one I’m going to have to see to believe.
Seeing is believing – try it for yourself!
Julian Schultz’s original article, http://www.oxfordwineroom.com/freezingwine.asp, has been taken down. Inf fact, it looks like the Oxford Wine Room is no more. Does anyone know what happened to them?
As I wrote earlier, the USDA’s 2007 honey report had some encouraging news about Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD). It also indicated that honey prices were virtually unchanged in 2007. They use something called the “all honey price,” which is a weighted index of different kinds of honey, in different regions, sold through retail and wholesale outlets in the United States. It fell from $1.036/lb, at the end of 2006, to $1.032/lb by the end of 2007. Here’s a table of honey prices that I keep an eye on, and how they changed from the last time I reported on them (August 2007):
| Source and Type | Price August 2007 ($/lb) | Recent Price | % Change |
| Costco Clover | 1.47 | 1.47 | 0 |
| Sam’s Club Clover | 1.53 | 1.53 | 0 |
| Miller’s Honey Clover | 1.45 | 1.55 | +6.9 |
| Miller’s Honey Wildflower | 1.08 | 1.15 | +6.5 |
| Dutch Gold Clover | N/A | 1.30 | – |
| Dutch Gold Wildflower | N/A | 1.26 | – |
Though it’s up a bit from last time, that Miller’s Honey wildflower still looks like a bargain. Costco is a warehouse store in the US that sells honey at near-wholesale prices in near-retail sizes (6 lb or 2.7 kg at my local store). Right now, they sell clover honey at a lower unit price, and in much smaller sizes, than Miller’s Honey. If you live close to one of their stores, you can take advantage of this deal and avoid shipping charges. Dutch Gold is a packer on the east coast that commenter Dick Adams recommended, and I’ll be including their prices going forward.
Better reporting of honey prices
I’d like to make some improvements to my Honey Prices feature. Up to now, I’ve been publishing a report when I buy honey or after some news comes out about honey prices. I’ll make a point of including year-end prices, to make my data more comparable with the USDA’s. I’m also interested in tracking honey prices in other countries. Maybe you can help. Do you know any reliable suppliers of inexpensive bulk honey that post prices on the web in English? How about government reports, again in English, on honey production and prices? I’d love to hear about them so I can track honey prices globally. Please let me know by leaving a comment.
Update 10/6/08 – What a difference seven months make!
My latest price reportindicates surging honey prices of between 6.5% and 38.9%.