quince

We once again had a great harvest of quinces, though we let them hang on the tree to ripen a lot longer this year resulting in a stronger flavor profile. For this batch, we didn't use any spices in the cooking water (just honey and lemon).

I switched the yeast for this year's batch as well.

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