Brewing Log

Continuing on my theme of making mead again, we had a huge harvest of Montmorency Cherries this year so I decided to make a mead with them.

We had even more quinces so decided to do a second batch of mead with the poaching liquid.

This batch we also added honey from our hives in order to target a higher ABV.

I'm also switching from Lalvin 71B to Lalvin K1V-1116

We harvested around 100lbs of quinces from our trees the other day and my wife processed them into quince paste. The first major step of making quince paste is poaching them, which my wife does in a spiced water. As a result, after 50lbs or so we were left with 3qts of concentrated quince juice, sugar, and spices. It tasted quite good, and had a decent amount of sugar, so we decided to make it into a mead.

It's been almost 7 years since I last made a mead that was higher than 6%, so this is also about remembering how to do so.

This batch was dumped out unfortunately

After tasting the last batch of cider as it was ferminting we decided to pick up another 5 gallons of cider from one of our local farms.

Due to one of the gallon jugs starting to wild ferment, I decided to lean into it.

Sadly this batch was dumped out as there were some unwanted spoilage bacteria/yeast that developed a not particularly pleasant off-flavor.

As it is apple season in the Willamette Valley, we went and picked up 5 gallons of fresh pressed cider from a local apple farm.