"Has anyone used this company" ?

Some time ago, loetz, a newish member over at Gotmead forums, asked the title question. He posted a link, which turned out to be a honey dealer in Germany (loetz give his location as Austria). So on the basis of the question, I had to say no, but this morning.........

It was a bit of a trial initially, as the linked website was only in German, but on saying that on the forum, loetz was kind enough to re-link it through the Google translate facility (the entire site/page ? not sure as I've only sussed out how to use that with a single page or paragraph). The fact that they've only currently got their website set up for selling/delivering to German addresses hasn't proved to be an issue either. As you can see from this (hopefully), it does make for interesting reading, despite the occasional short comings of Google translate. It enabled me to email them and ask. Their shop staff were very helpful, sending me details and a quote for both the honey and shipping. I know roughly how much honey can cost for a varietal honey, and their quote for €112.23 which included all the tax and shipping element, still worked out reasonable. Obviously it would have been a bit cheaper if I'd ordered a 25kg bucket instead of a 12.5kg bucket, on a price per kilo basis, and likely a little more on the shipping. Either way, it worked out fine, and after a short delay of making the payment (which was equally as painless, just a phonecall to my bank, and supplying the Walter Lang swift and DBAN codes, it was all sorted. I emailed them to say about the payment being on it's way and that my bank expected it to take 2 working days (I called my bank on the sunday). The shop people from Walter Lang were kind enough to notify me that they'd received the payment by the monday afternoon and it was shipped on the tuesday. The delivery people carded me on the thursday and I've been to the post office (the delivery this end was attempted by ParcelForce, and under their "convenient delivery" arrangements, they left it at the post office) this morning to collect it. Overall, it's been excellent to deal with the people at Walter Lang (who now seem to have got an english language bit on their website - well done, brilliant). I'll happily deal with them again. For the varieties I can't find locally....... As for the honey itself ? It's not as dark as the descriptions that are sometimes posted around the bazaars in respect of Buckwheat honey, but this batch is from the Ukraine. It's similar to the bucket that Male (a member over at Gotmead, who's in Poland) helped me to get a couple of years back. Less like the descriptions of the stuff from the US. Certainly not "farmyard" in character. In the case of the two buckets I've had/got, it's not so sweet tasting as many varieties, has almost a malt-like character to it. I'm looking forward to making a traditional batch from it. Someone said that at last years Mazer cup, there was a Polish Buckwheat tradtional that did very well, producing an excellent mead....... Pip pip !

Comments etc....

Just got my finger out and actually see if anyone had posted comments (noticed a while back there was a few bits of spam......) Brilliant. Some good ones there. Nothing rubbish or rude etc - ha! any that were offensive or spammy shite would just get deleted anyway :D Sorry if it's taken me a while to actually read them, but I want to try and be a little more conscientious....... (watch this space) The only thing I'm not sure about is where Marek said about making a "Blackthorn melomel" ? I presume that meant using the Sloe's for the fruit, or was that to make it like the French recipe where they use the leaves etc ? I'm gonna go with the fruit, as I might actually be able to get time to pick some this year - should have been out last, but as the bloody builders still had the place in pieces, that was out of the question ! Hey ho! shit happens

Young's "High Alcohol/Dessert Wine" yeasts - some excellent info.......

One of the members over at Gotmead, who can't find much by way of wine yeast locally, emailed Young's to ask them.

They were kind enough to attach the following text, by way of a .pdf file attachment.

Dessert / High Alcohol Wine Yeast 5g

Young’s yeast’s range is the result of over 2 years worth of research, testing and analysis of commercial yeast strains.
Yeast strains from the leading manufacturers world-wide were screened to determine which of those performed best
for home beer, wine & cider making, and selections were based on quality not price. Our commitment to this quality
is shown in the fact that each batch of yeast we receive is checked microbially and also fermented out before it’s
packed – this ensures the quality is consistent in every sachet, and every bottle you produce.

Species: Saccharomyces Bayanus

Young’s Dessert / High Alcohol Wine Yeast is an exceptional strain that allows optimum wine quality to be achieved
with each and every brew. It’s properties include an ability to ferment up to 18% ABV, rapid clearing, low foam
formation, and the ability to ferment as low as 10°C means this is a reliable and easy to handle strain. You can expect
a taste and aroma profile that will bring the natural grape flavours to the fore, it will also add a definite weight and
depth to your wine, making it perfect for high alcohol sweet wines. Excellent across numerous varietals producing
classic, true to type sweet, flavoursome wines with balanced mouthfeel and smooth finish, exuding the baked fruit
flavours synonymous with high alcohol wines. Making well structured, clean wines that are a wonderful accompaniment
to many after dinner treats is what this strain does beautifully.

Uses

Youngs Dessert / High Alcohol Wine Yeast is a excellent all round strain, perfect choice for high alcohol, dessert and
fortified wines.

Technical Information

Alcohol tolerance: 18% v/v
SO tolerance: High
Foaming: Low
Low production of fusel oils
Viability: >1.0x 10 CFU/g
Wild yeast: <1 br="" million="" per=""> Total bacteria: <5 br="" million="" per="">
Instructions

This is a controlled, consistent and reliable yeast with capability to ferment between 10-30°C, though best results are
achieved when temperature remains stable between 20-24°C. It is important that the must remains above 20°C for at
least the first 24 hours after the yeast is pitched, this will help to avoid bacterial contamination and extended lag time.
The sachet contents (5g) is designed to be pitched into 23 litres of must. This can be done directly, by sprinkling on to
the surface and standing for 15 minutes before mixing in thoroughly for a further 2 minutes or by rehydrating before
addittion - reccommended for high alcohol wines. To rehydrate, mix the dry yeast into 100ml of 40°C water and stir
periodically over a 10-12 minute period until cream. Temperature adjust this to within 5°C of the must by gradually
and slowly stirring in cold water to the rehydrated yeast, add this to the must and mix thoroughly before leaving to
ferment at 20-24 °C.

Storage

Sachets should be stored in a cool, dry place away from direct sunlight. If stored correctly, the yeast will have a shelf
life of 24 months from date of manufacture. Store in a dry, odour free environment at a constant temperature ideally
below 20°C. Once opened the contents should be used immediately. Use by best before date stamped on the packaging.
Young’s yeast sachets are packed into the highest grade quality laminate material providing a complete gas and
moisture barrier.

-----

This material is non-hazardous when used as directed. Young’s yeasts are free from allergens and
free from genetically modified organisms or materials derived from genetically modified organisms.

So, while they might have been able to make it a bit briefer, but with more detail, similar to how you find the listing in the Lallemand yeast chart, for their "offerings", but I'm not goiing to moan. It's the best bit of info I've seen about a Youngs product for some time. Their generic listings do piss me off....... it's not like it's any kind of proprietary trade secret !

But thanks very much to Stasis, over at Gotmead for the info. Very much appreciated.

I'm not a bee keeper but..........

http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/articles/1829/buzz-kill is a link I found while stumbling around.

Now I'm not a bee keeper, but as a mead maker, I try to read up about articles that mention about the kind of problems that bee keepers are facing.

Hence I've posted this over at gotmead (having not seen it or seen it linked etc) to see what some of them, if they can be bothered, to read it, think.

I know that some will, as some of the gotmeaders are bee keepers. I'll have to wait and see

Pip pip!

Moniack Mead... a mini review........ part 2

Right ho, thinks me. It's time for the pH meter. Now I don't have much acid testing kit, because meads are fuckers too test. You can get a pH figure, but titration tests etc are usually out the window as they test for tartaric acid etc, in wines. Plus when making meads, any reader who makes their own, knows that we have to keep the pH in the middle sort of area of the 3.X pH range. Because if it drops below 3.0 pH the yeast can throw their toys out their pram and say bollocks, causing a stuck ferment - this seems especially important with traditional meads, because basically there's bog all to buffer the pH and it can swing quite wildly. Melomels, fruit meads in general, this seems to be less of an issue as the fruit can buffer the pH some and you're less likely  to have to reach for the potassium carbonate.

Ok, check the pH meter, fuck....... run out of calibration solution. Ok thinks me, last time I checked the tap water, it was 7.01 pH and while this pH meter is cheaper than the old one (old one measured in hundredths, this one only measures in tenths), I can use tap water, calibrate to neutral (7.0 pH) and it should be close enough.

So, calibrated with water, then into the mead, fuck! that can't be right. Ok so down the shed for some new batteries. Installed, fine. Rinsed test meter again, 7.0 pH for tap water - should only be a hundredth out, fine, that's close enough. Into the mead and.........

2 point fucking 6 ? No wonder it didn't taste cloyingly sweet. I can't say for certain, but one of the known ways for masking excess sweetness is acid, or sometimes tannin addition.

Not surprising it's not as sweet as the other commercial meads I'd previously tasted. I can't say which acid might have been used, but I have to presume that's how it's been done. Could be wrong, but I add acid all the time to reduce sweetness in my own meads.

Personally, I like to use the mix suggested in Ashton & Duncans book "Making Mead" when I do this. It's 2 parts malic acid to 1 part tartaric acid, but I try to add it incrementally so as not to over do it.

2.6 pH ? Amazing.

So what was my over all view ?

Well, I like the colour, there's nothing to suggest whether they just happened to use a dark coloured honey, whether it might have been wild flower, or varietal like heather which can be dark but not always, or even sourced some dark buckwheat to do that. Don't know, just that it's a nice colour.

The aroma wasn't what I'd call very strong. I've mentioned a possible reason for that above, yet it's common for home mead makers not to boil or heat honey very much at all currently, as it preserves more of the aromatics of the honey, whereas boiled honey/must, apparently gives a nicer, less rough, more rounded sort of taste.

The taste was good IMO, didn't seem too sweet, a smooth after taste if the mead is held in the mouth for a couple of moments. Nice "body", good legs in the glass (even though I had to put it into the bottom of a pint glass, as all the other wine glasses are packed away while the bloody builders are shitting up the house......)

I'd give it a "very good" grade, peeking over the edge of excellent. Maybe that'd be a "high" 4 out of 5, almost 4.5 out of 5.

Compared to what I'd paid for half bottles previously, the advertised £8.40 a bottle (on the website, without shipping) didn't seem too bad at all.

My only real critcism is the "corporate generic" appearance of the label and the wording. That gets a "could do better", but WTF, it doesn't affect the taste.......

Moniack Mead...a mini review........ part 1

So, one of the members over at Gotmead, being a Brit, who now lives in the US, wanted to know a bit about one of his favourite mead tipples.

It's called Moniack Mead.

Now this isn't one that I'd come across before, certainly not when I was trying a few commercially made meads about 4 or 5 years ago.

So the only guide I had to go on, was my own mini reviews. Before today, of the 4 commercial meads I'd tried, I found that they all tasted fine. Sweet, yes but cloyingly so (if you want to read what I said, which is only personal opinion, but I stand by it. They might have improved/changed, I can't say. They were pretty expensive at the time, but I felt I should taste some of the offerings available locally).

Now, after a few exchanged messages with Tony, he explained that as far as he was aware, it was made from Heather honey - which from my own experience, tends to be quite expensive. He ordered a bottle and arranged for it to be delivered to me (didn't matter whether it was a load of shit or not, I thought it was a nice gesture as I certainly wouldn't say no to a free bottle of mead, or any booze for that matter).

Once opened, I was surprised to find that the bottle was different to how I'd expected it to be. I suspect Tony hadn't had any for a few years and the bottle is nicely done, if a bit "generic corporate", in label design. There was no mention of heather honey, but some of the wording made me thing that it had been made elsewhere as it was "specially selected". A term you see when supermarkets buy in something made somewhere else, but sold under their label/branding. I have no way of knowing if that might be the case.

Anyway, here's what it looked like in the bottle.......

So not the best of photo's but enough that you can see it's a nice colour, a reddish amber of medium sort of darkness (actually looks better in daylight, but I had to put a piece of white paper behind it so the colour of the liquid wasn't blanked out completely by the flash).

Ok, so looks fine. Like the greedy git I am, pop the cap and take a sniff.

Nothing remarkable there. Like a traditional mead sort of smell, not in your face aromatics, but given some of the stuff I've read recently and what I'll say further in, I'm wondering if they boil or at least heat the must during the early stages of making......

Next, the taste....

A decent flavour, not, seemingly, as mega sweet and cloying as the other commercial meads I'd tasted (and I guessed wrongly, more later). Nice, enjoyable. I decided it would likely fall in the the "dessert" mead a.k.a. after dinner, category.

Ok thought me, time to get the hydrometer out. So with a test quantity (eventually I did drink it - well you would, wouldn't you, free mead and all that). The test picture looked like this......

Now, again, not the best photograph. I had to lean the hydrometer slightly, but hopefully it's clear enough so that you can see it was measuring 1.036......

Which is higher than I thought it would be, given that it was sweet but not cloyingly so like my previous tastes of commercial mead were. I thought it might tip the scale in the mid .020's or so.

Yet it tasted good, sweet but not........ etc etc.

Before I forget (nutrients etc, for meads)........

 One of the members over at Homebrewtalk, by the name of Jeffjm (full credit there sir, a bloody good article), posted this link on a thread where another member had asked about "Mead Books" worthy of reading........

https://www.homebrewersassociation.org/attachments/0000/1256/NDzym05_MasterMead.pdf

I've downloaded a copy to read and even though I've only read the first page and a half, it makes for excellent reading.

I do hope it will continue to be available to others.

I think (not checked) it's from Zymrugy mag........

Nightmare on the mead making front.....

Had a few minor victories recently. One of the members over at Gotmead kindly sent me a small strip of Fleischmanns bread yeast, so that I can have a got at a benchmark batch of Joe's Ancient Orange (it's not a UK brand so is unavailable here).

But the nightmare is, that about 6 to 9 months ago, my partner Clare, decided that she wanted the kitchen changed. Ok thinks me, shouldn't be a problem. She gets the ball rolling and gets plans, permissions, etc sorted and arranges the money to pay for it, etc etc. Again, fine.

She starts moving stuff around (she's a serial organiser/planner) in good time, etc etc.

As the start date for the work approaches, I start to worry. Moving 3 rooms worth of crap into the rest of the house and the shed, is starting to make things a bit cramped.

We get a bit closer to the start of the work and it's starting to dawn on me that I'm pretty much gonna be screwed for the 3 months or so of the works.

At the time of writing this, the old rear house extension bit has been demolished, the footings have been dug, re-inforced and the concrete has been poured. The brick layer is due in on monday morning.

The hassle really dawned this past week. The footings were due to be poured on the wednesday, but the concrete pump arrived and then promptly broke down, so the concrete had to be sent away  and the pump went back to the depot etc. So as the builders had nothing to do, they literally sawed the back third off the kitchen and boarded it up, along with the back 1/3rd of the dining room (both these rooms are being knocked into one anyway). This is all so that they can put the steels in for the roof supports of the new, bigger extension bit.

I suspect you get the picture. If I can actually do anything during the building time, I'll be very lucky. I've got to try and find room to do a bit of racking etc, as some of the batches I've got settling, ageing, steeping etc, need to be racked to reduce down the amount of space they take up.

God forbid, I'm even likely gonna have to put anything that isn't turning out Ok down the bloody drain - which I don't want to do as I'm a great believer that you can normally salvage any batches that come out rubbish, even if it's only to recover the alcohol to be able to use it for something else.......

I'll post again once I know how things are progressing etc.

For the time being, my home brew is "aaarrrrggggghhhhhh".......

Meads and meanings.........

Recently been trying to answer a few Q's over at Gotmead, Homebrewtalk, Winemakingtalk and even Jimsbeerkit - well the mead questions anyway.....

I've come to realise that there's a few problems, what with having no real standards, and even the language can be an issue.

I mean, what are the actual reasons that you make meads ? what're your motivations ?

Is it what I call the "airy fairy" shit ? That you like dressing up like some idiot extra from a historical drama ? Is it that there are not standards so you are pretty free to make what you want and how you want ? Is it the "sciencey" stuff and the route to making the "perfect" mead ? Or something else.

For example, mead makers from the US are far more likely to want to try making something with some relatively strange, almost "outlandish" ingredients. Well that's fine, it's their brews so obviously, their choice. Likewise, there also seems a greater number of the US based makers who want to use some sort of weird nomenclature for giving their brew a strange name (Thors bloody cauldron dregs ? or other foolish naming). Again, their brew etc etc......

Personally, I find it hard to understand my own motivations. While I understand that there shouldn't really be any set standards per se, maybe we should, as a mead making community, work out a "best practice" ?

After all, it's open to debate whether it was wines, beers, ciders or meads that were the first alcoholic drinks, but I do suspect it was more likely to be something that would ferment reasonably readily. Which would suggest wines and ciders, purely because honey doesn't ferment so readily as the juice of grape or apple does it. We have to water it down so that it has a sugars concentration that resembles fruit juice.......

I doubt it would be beers, because the process of making even the most basic of beer recipes is quite convoluted.......

Now equally, I don't "run" with the idea of giving too much credence to the mythical nonsense that some like to accredit to meads. I prefer to take the rather "bald" methods, techniques and ingredients, as it's easier to follow and get your head round what a certain ingredient might do.

For instance, the honey itself. The penchant for varietals that seems to emanate from the US, seems to have come from the reasonably modern "factory farming" methods preferred there, along with the more modern techniques used in apiary management and the very usage of the bees natural desire to collect the nectar for their hive while carrying out the incidental pollination of crops - especially crops that are grown in areas of relative mono-culture, which according to the quality of the land, local climate and crop type that best suits the first two requirements, a good example being Florida and oranges/orange blossom or a couple of different ones in California etc etc.

No one really knows how meads were originally made, the peoples famed for drinking meads didn't really record that in a way that we can follow. Sure there are some archaic documents that give us some idea, but a lot of those contain methods/technique that has been discredited as not being necessary.

Equally, modern business practices, mean that there has been a lot of blending of honey harvested from many locations, with a view to making it "consistent", so that it has the longest possible shelf life and stays in the form it's been processed into, to maximise the profit margins of the "producers" or sellers. With us ending up with a bland, characterless honey.

There seems to be little argument, that the "best quality" for a honey that is going to be fermented, is that it's raw and unprocessed, because that type will retain the greatest amount of "character", whether that be a certain flavour, colour or aroma. It doesn't even have to have been filtered to remove any hive or apiary debris, as that comes out during the making of the mead.

Then there's the yeast we use. Commonly, the yeast comes from the wine making world, though there's those who like to use a beer yeast for different reasons/justification. Fine, if it works then go with it. Hell, there's even the fabled JAO recipe, that uses bread yeast, which also works. The only yeast type I take issue with are so called "mead yeasts". Not because they don't work, generally they do, but because there is no way in hell that the companies that supply yeasts called that, can know exactly what kind of yeast were originally used to make mead. In fact, it's unlikely that there would have been a specific type, because the peoples weren't advanced enough to understand yeasts and yeast strains/isolations like we do now (and yes, that can also change i.e. we learn even more about yeasts......)

So I suggest that to label a couple of strains in such a way, is little more than marketing and the desire to sell more yeast.

Even if we only took the range of wine yeasts sold and focused solely on those, there's the difference of opinion as to what is best. An example of that, is that new mead makers often ask at a Home Brew Supplier, who in turn, don't really know much about mead making, but make many generalisations about mead and the making, and then just suggest a reasonably capable champagne type isolate.

The issue that I have with champagne yeasts, isn't that they're bad, they're not, but they do seem to have a habit of blowing a lot of the aromatics straight out of the airlock, along with some of the more volatile flavouring compounds. Champagne yeasts do, quite successfully, what they have been found capable of i.e. fermenting a reasonably bland white wine, dry. Then because they have the ability to ferment to a higher level of alcohol, than the grapes would be capable of producing, that they can then be used further, to make that wine into a sparkling wine. Hell it wasn't even the French who first discovered this ability, it was found here, but it was the legendary "Dom Perignon" who seems to have refined the process (or was it, as has often been found, that while the "West" claims to have invented something, only for it later to be found/proved, that it was first developed by the Chinese ?).

Either way, it does seem that the only reason for the high price of champagne, being market manipulation (certainly not any wonderful taste experience).

Personally, I prefer the yeasts that have been found to make good brews, by other mead makers. Like the late Brother Adam, of Buckfast Abbey and bee breeding (and mead making) fame.

Bro Adams writings on mead making are limited, when compared to his bee breeding works, yet there is enough information for us to benefit from his knowledge and experience.

Example ? Well, if you read some of the stuff available, he mentions using comb and capping "washings" to make his meads, likewise, he said about using "Maury" yeast to make his meads. He doesn't seem to have published much on his specific techniques other than that it was the washings and yeast, which were kept in barrels to ferment and age for something like 7 years or so. Whether that's entirely correct, I don't know. Were his meads just "show meads" ? or were other ingredients used ? The fabled "Maury" yeast ? Where did it really come from ?

As far as I can find out, the currently available "Maury" yeast is lalvins D21, but as that was isolated after Brother Adams death, there's no real way of knowing. When the Abbey replied to my query, they were very kind in pointing out that when Bro Adam could no longer obtain the Maury yeast he mentioned in his writings, he changed to using "Montpellier" strain yeast. So given that Buckfast is here in the UK, he most likely used the locally (UK) packaged version of the Montpellier strain, which would have been Gervins Varietal "E", which isn't now available from Gervin (part of the Muntons group now). Yet it is still available and it's available in home brew sized packs too.... it's the excellent Lalvin K1-V1116. Which IMO, is a far better yeast to recommend to the new mead maker than the champagne EC-1118 yeast.

I certainly find it makes a far better mead.......


TBC.........

Stupid naming conventions/nomenclature !

When I'm looking through the various forums, trying to see if anyone has posted a thread that explains a problem they're having or just a question they're looking to find an answer for? Call me old fashioned (hell even that phrase sounds dated), but if you posted a question of "Why is X happening" ? Or "Made a whatever batch, but it's doing Y" ? Then I'm likely to answer it if I can offer something to point you in the right direction or maybe suggest how to work out what might be going on.

If you post "Stonehenge, the Mystery Brew", I'm not even gonna read your post. I don't want to read about new age weirdness. I want to try and be of help if I can, I like to try and be helpful. There's too much shit around where people or organisations want to charge for or sell knowledge. I'm very "open source" with my attitude toward knowledge. But if you start with naming your brews, with idiotic names, then fuck it, I can't be bothered to read through a load of "fairy story mumbo jumbo" to try and understand what the problem might be.

There's a few people over at Gotmead, that like to do that, presumably because they like to demonstrate their "right on", hippy credentials. Sorry, I just find that all too damn pretentious. Just tell me the type of brew you're trying to make and if I have something to add, I'll happily do so.

Call it something fucking stupid and bollocks, I won't even bother to read the post. I don't believe in all the so called mystical crap. There's no such thing as a fucking Druid, there might have been but they were likely just religious shamen types and the Romans wasted them all 2 millenia ago, with just historical and cultural references to them. There is no "magic". All the stuff that those wankers come up with at Stonehenge at the summer and winter solstices is just a lot of shit. All thought up by the pretentious pricks who take part in such nonsense.

So just ask me about meads but use sensible, practical descriptions of what you are doing/making and what you want to know, then no snags, if I can help, I will. Ask me about the other kind of shit and I'll likely just walk........