Sunday, December 04, 2011

A bit of a result there.....

Blagged Honey!
I did a delivery to a local farm on friday, and after chatting with the farmer about the 25 to 30 bee hives I could see in the bushes, just off the road, when he said "did I want some honey", it took me a couple of milliseconds to say yes.

He came back from the farm house with a bucket containing 17 jars, which turn out to be 340gramme jars, so as he said that the bloke who owns the hives wanted the jars back if possible, I've just spent a couple of hours pouring it into a couple of small buckets and rinsing the jars out with warm water.

The jar washings are now sitting in a demi-john (1 gallon size) and I've also blitzed 2lb in a pint of water, to bring the gravity up to somewhere near where I'll want it.

The honey itself, is very sweet, with a light flavour, despite it being quite a golden colour. I'm gonna flip a coin as to whether I use K1-V1116 yeast or D21 yeast, both of which were used by the late Brother Adam of Buckfast Abbey bee breeding and mead making fame during his lifetime.

As the K1V will go to 18% and the D21 to 16% ABV, I'm thinking I'll go for a Sack mead in the 16% area and back sweeten it to about 1.020, so it's sweet to taste but not in a cloying way that some of the commercial meads can be.

What I'll do with the rest of the honey has yet to be decided......

Not a bad blag for a gobby fucker like me eh !

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