Simple Bochet

Simple Bochet

            It is amazing the different kinds of mead you can make even with a standard set of ingredients. Bochet, also known as burnt honey mead, is a fantastic example of this as the Simple Bochet only has four ingredients, yet tastes vastly different than a standard Dorm Closet Mead. Offering the flavors of toffee and coffee, Bochet is a good alternative for anyone who is intrigued by chocolate mead, but does not have five years to wait for it to ferment.

Ingredients and Equipment:

            To brew Bochet, you will need 2lb honey, a packet of Lalvin EC-1118 which is normally too volatile for a sweeter mead, but the heating process renders some of the sugar unfermentable, 14 cups-1 gallon purified water, and 1 tsp yeast nutrient. Substituting 25 raisins per gallon for the yeast nutrient is possible, but not recommended as flavors will transfer.
            As for equipment, you will need a 2 gallon brew bucket, a 3 piece econo-lock, a stir stick, a vessel to activate the yeast, and a heating implement, one deep large-based pot, and one wide, shallow pan which the pot can fit into. You probably have most of this on hand, but it is always good to double check.

- Lalvin EC-1118: $1.00

-2lb Honey: $7.50

-Yeast Nutrient: $1.50

Total: $10.00

Directions:

-Step One: Preparation

            -Wash and sanitize all equipment. If you are using a pot you have cooked with before, consider using steel wool and washing out the pot with boiling water before sanatizing

            -Place the bottle of honey in a pot or bowl of water just below the boiling point to warm up the honey and make it more pliable. If the plastic is cheap and the water is too hot, you risk melting the bottle and ruining the honey, but the risk in minimal and pouring honey at room temperature in unbearably slow.

            -Heat the pot very slightly in preparation for the honey. If you are using a stove top to heat your honey, the lowest setting is a good place to start.

-Step Two: Heating

            -Pour the honey into the pot slowly. Make use of your stir stick to spread the honey evenly over the bottom of the pot.

            -Between the 10 and 20 minute mark, the honey should start to bubble and boil. From here on out, you will need to constantly stir the pot to keep the honey from either boiling over or burning at the bottom of the pot.

            -Between 60 to 120 minutes is when the honey becomes viably heated for a Bochet. During this time, carefully sample the honey in order to pick your flavor.

            -At whatever stopping point you choose, fill the shallow pan with ice water and place the pot into the ice bath. If not quickly cooled, the residual heat in the metal and the honey will continue cooking beyond the desired point.

-Step Three: Mixing

            -Pour in the heated honey into the brew bucket first doing your best to scrape all of the honey out of the pot before it hardens.

            -Divide the gallon of water into three separate batches for convenience. Heat each portion to just below the boiling point and transfer the water through the pot used to cook the honey on its way to the brew bucket. This will melt more of the hardened honey and insure a greater flavor transfer. After three separate rinses, all of the residual honey should be transferred.

            -Add 1 tsp of yeast nutrient to your honey/water mixture and stir thoroughly until the must resembles fresh coffee.

-Step Four: Pitching

            -Heat 1/4^th C of water to between 105-109 °F in your extra glass vessel. Stir in the yeast packet, swirl the mixture until it becomes uniform, and place the cup somewhere slightly warm for 15 min while the yeast activates.

            -While your yeast is activating, take this time to aerate your mead in preparation for the pitch. Stir the mixture thoroughly for 5-10 min stopping just before the 15 min of yeast activation is over. By the end, your brew should be observably bubbly.
            -Carefully pour the activated yeast mixture into your brew bucket and give the bucket one, slow, gentle stir to thoroughly introduce the yeast. Stirring too much at this point can agitate the yeast and create off flavors.

-Step Five: Finishing Touches.
             -Add the lid to your brew bucket and run your hands around the rim to be sure the seal is complete.
             -Fill your econo-lock up to the marked line with distilled water, not vodka, and apply the air lock to the rubber grommet in the buckets lid.

Storage and Fermentation:

            The mead will need +30 days for primary fermentation and for the yeast to go through fermentation and then do some cleaning up and dying off. The mead should be kept in a dark place with a temperature between 59-86 °F to encourage the yeast to ferment slowly and not create any off flavors. During the first few days, pay attention to the airlock to check for bubbles. If there are no bubbles during this time, consider re-pitching another packet of yeast.

            After a little over a month, the Simple Bochet will be done with primary and ready for secondary fermentation.

            Leave the mead in secondary fermentation for at least a month to allow dead yeast and other detritus to filter to the bottom of the new vessel. After the mead has reached your desired clarity and mellowed to your desired taste, feel free to bottle at any time. This entire process should not take longer than three months, but if the flavors are undesirable at the end of this time, consider leaving the mead a bit longer.

            Drink and enjoy.

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Makeshift Conical Fermenter

Makeshift Conical Fermenter

            In primary and secondary fermentation, a thin layer of foul tasting scum will accumulate at the bottom of the fermentation chamber as dead yeast and other detritus drop out of the brew and settle to the bottom. When racking or bottling, a buffering inch of liquid must be left above this layer of muck to avoid taking up the dead yeast.

            Conical fermenters are the amazing inverted cone shaped vessels built against this inch. They’ve been designed to minimize the surface are of the bottom of the vessel and because of this shrink the volume lost due to that pesky inch. Unfortunately, conical fermenters are at least four times the cost of standard fermentation chambers.

            As a quick, cheap trick, a conical fermenter can be created with a sliced up bottle, a wide based cup, and some foil or plastic wrap. Keep in mind that this vessel is not sturdy enough to fully replace a brewing vessel and the foil/plastic wrap are nowhere near as reliable as a real airlock. The makeshift conical fermenter only acts as a temporary layover to help clear out some yeast. For best use and least risk, only use the conical fermenter during a cold crash.

Process:

             -Slice off the base of a thoroughly cleaned and sanitized plastic bottle.

      -Turn over the mangled bottle and balance it in a sturdy, wide based glass which will act as the scaffolding

             -Add the plastic/foil to cover up the gaping hole tight enough to keep insects out and minimize exposure to bacteria, but loose enough for gases to escape.

            Drink and enjoy.

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Freeze Distillation

Freeze Distillation

Notice: Freeze Distillation is illegal in the United States due to the possibility of methanol poisoning resulting from consumption of the distilled drink. In freeze distillation, unlike normal distillation, methanol cannot be filtered out of the resulting drink and will remain in a higher concentration just as ethanol. Consumption of beverages with high concentrations of methanol can cause blindness, kidney failure, and death.

            If you are a United States citizen and decide to attempt freeze distillation, you will need to finish this process while losing no less than 5% of the original volume as to not raise the concentration of impurities. Any removed ice can be replaced with distilled water.

            If you were not frightened off by the warning, freeze distillation is a process used to concentrate flavors and raise alcohol content, most notably used in applejack, ice beer, and eiswein. As water in your beverage will freeze at a higher temperature than the ethanol, the remaining water can be partially removed by leaving your brew either out in a snow storm as it was traditionally done, or by leaving it in a freezer for a few hours and filtering out the ice.

            To raise the alcohol content even further, this process can be repeated until your brew no longer freezes, but it is inadvisable as freeze distillation will not remove impurities from your brew in the same way as traditional distillation.

            There are many ways to handle to go about this, but this one is my favorite so far.

Process:

            -Transfer your brew into one or many freezer-safe sanitized bottles preferably with a thin neck. Leave an inch below the neck line empty to allow for expansion and avoid creating a bottle bomb.

            -Place the bottles in the freezer for four hours allowing most of the excess water to freeze. The bottles should be placed neck up and not sideways to make sure the neck does not freeze shut. Since you will probably be starting with a low alcohol concentration, leaving your brew too long will leave the whole bottle frozen through and you will be unable to transfer out the water from the ethanol.

            -After the four hours, remove the bottle(s) from the freezer and empty the remaining liquid into a separate sanitized container. If your brew is frozen to the point where the ice will not pass through the bottle neck, you can simply pour your brew to the next container straight. However, if the mouth of the bottle is too wide of your brew froze in smaller chunks, you can make use of a wire filter or a bottle spout to keep the ice from transferring.

            -At this point, you can choose to either bottle your brew and put it on a shelf to mellow for a month, or transfer your remaining brew back into your freezer safe-bottle(s) to let it go for another round.

            Drink responsibly and enjoy.

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Dorm Closet Mead

Dorm Closet Mead

            Dorm Closet Mead is the most basic recipe for anyone looking to get into home brewing, but who does not want to make a large investment. The cost of ingredients and equipment together should not be any more than $15.00. It is the cheapest recipe you could possibly hope for when first experimenting aside from the recipe found in De re Rustica, but comes with less control in flavor and clarity. Flavors aside, if this is your first time as a mazer this is a nice, simple test recipe.

Ingredients and Equipment:

            To make Dorm Closet Mead, you will need to collect a packet of dry Fleischmann's yeast, an orange, 2lb honey, a packet of raisins, a gallon of spring water, and a balloon/rubber glove, a square of foil, and a rubber band for the airlock.

- Fleischmann's Yeast: $1.50

- Orange: $0.75

-2lb Honey: $7.50

-Raisins: $1.50

-Spring Water: $1.00

-Improv-Airlock: $2.00

Total: $14.25

Directions:

-Step One: Preparation

            -Wash, freeze, and slice the orange into eight parts. Washing the orange is important to keep any wild yeast out of the mead and freezing the orange will break up some of the flesh and make it easier for flavors to transfer.

            -Pour half the gallon into clean containers. Leave 1/4^th C of the excess water in a separate container as illustrated by the red cup above. This will be used for yeast activation later on. The rest of the water will probably not be needed, but if you poured too much out, you may have to top off the brew at the end.

            -Place the bottle of honey in a pot or bowl of water just below the boiling point to warm up the honey and make it more pliable. If the plastic is cheap and the water is too hot, you risk melting the bottle and ruining the honey, but the risk in minimal.

-Step Two: Mixing

            -Pour the heated honey into the mixture using a wide mouthed funnel. The honey not only acts as the base flavor, but provides most of the fermentable sugar for the mead.

            -Add the 8 cleaned and frozen orange slices, peel and all, to the jug to give the mead a more complex flavor.

            -Add 25 raisins to the jug which will act as a yeast nutrient. Adding too few will leave the yeast starving and leave fermentation incomplete while adding too many will leave the mead with an unwanted grape aftertaste.

-Step Three: Pitching

            -Put the cap back onto the jug with an inch or two of empty space between the top of the must and the bottom of the cap and shake vigorously for 2-5 minutes to aerate the mead. The yeast will need some oxygen to survive and ferment.

            -Heat the extra 1/4^th C of water to between 100-105 °F and stir the packet of yeast into the water. Swirl the glass until it begins to give off the smell of unbaked bread, allow the yeast to rehydrate for around 4 minutes before pitching the yeast into the mead.

-Step Four: Finishing Touches.

            -If you have more than 1 inch in between the top of the must and the bottom of the bottle neck, top off the mead with some of the extra water. After you have the mead at an appropriate volume, place the square of foil over the mouth and poke 5 holes in the covering.

            -Poke three holes in the balloon or glove and secure this over the foil with a rubber band. If the mead ferments too vigorously and the balloon/glove is overly inflated, add a few more holes until the swelling goes down. The improve-airlock is there to keep insects and free floating bacteria out of the mead. It will not work perfectly, but it will serve you well enough.

Storage and Fermentation:

            The mead will need +30 days for fermentation and for the yeast to do some cleaning up and dying off. The first two of these thirty days should be spent sitting in a sink or tub on the off chance of an explosion or an overflow, but that should not be an issue with bread yeast and an improve-airlock. Through the rest of primary fermentation the mead should be kept in a dark place with a temperature between 55-70 °F to create a nice habitat for the yeast. During this time, frequently check the balloon/glove and rubber band for atrophy, replace them as needed.

            After a little over a month, the Dorm Closet Mead will be done and drinkable. If you can control yourself, it is a good practice to leave the mead longer for the flavors do develop and mellow, but it is not necessary.

            If you are worried about clarity, after the thirty days is over pour the mead into another empty gallon jug being careful not to transfer any of the orange, pulp, raisins, or yeast residue. Place that jug in a refrigerator for 48 hours to killing off some of the remaining yeast and let it settle at the bottom, also known as cold crashing. Finally, thoroughly clean the first jug and pour the cleared up mead back into the first jug being careful not to transfer the dead yeast at the bottom. This entire process is known as racking and will leave you with a cleaner, clearer mead, but will not clean it up perfectly.

Final Step:

            Drink and enjoy.

If you want to find more recipes by this author go to alcoauto.blogspot.com

If you want future updates, follow us on Twitter @alco_auto