Leatherwood and Macadamia Mead

Juice of one lemon
300g leatherwood honey - smells like a flower shop crazy stuff!
700g macadamia honey - nice and sweat
5 liters of filtered water
Wine yeast
Wine Nutrient

SG: 1.060  (This will give me about a 8-9% wine)

First off boil your water

Then get a good thermometer, I am very proud of my new digital one, and wait for it to get to 72C. Add your room temperature honey and the temp will drop to around 66C. Stir like mad! Keep watching the temp and if it drops below 66C kick a little fire under its ass to keep things going.

Your goal is to keep it at 66C for 22 minutes. This kills the bacteria in the honey but doesn't destroy the pollen fragrances. There is no need to boil it.

When your 22 minutes is up mix up your wine yeast and nutrient in a tea cup and set aside.

Wait for the honey mixture to cool to around 25-27C add your yeast and cool it down to 12-16C.

This one looks awesome, very light in color and still smells really nice. We will see what happens in a months time!

I should get about 5-6 bottles and I plan to do 4 as sparkling. So I will add more honey to the bottles and let them bottle ferment for a month or two to carbonate the little monkeys!

First Mead

Well I decided to pull the mead out and have a look / taste as I racked off to another demi-john.

WOW! What a taste! Its a bit young from what I have been reading but it was nice, sweet, fragrant and nicely alcoholic.

It could be aged for another 3-12 months and I will likely do that but in bottle form.

You can see at the bottom all the sediment which is the yeast, dead yeast and other partials.

This is the bit we don't want to take with us when we transfer (rack off) to the next demi-john.

With a helpful hand from Kasey we were successful!

We took a glass from the bottom so it would contain some of the yeast and other things we don't want to transfer and tried it. Wow! Great stuff. Like I said before sweet, fragrant and smooth. Had a hint of our honey and some of the smell as well.

Mango Wine

Unfortunately no photos for this post. I am a total slacker. I'll take some photos of mangos and edit them in later ;-)

Recipe (All items are organic or filtrated water - QUALITY makes all the difference) :

10 Large Mangos
5 Limes
1 Earl Grey tea bag
2 Liters of Water
300ml of Honey (Yellow box)
Wine Yeast
Wine Nutrient

Juice the mangos and limes, add the water and the honey. Heat to 70C for a few minutes. Add the tea bag and let it seep for a few more minutes. Remove tea bag, and poor into demi-john. Cool the demi-john to blood temp. Add the yeast and the wine nutrient you have been growing in a standard coffee cup to the demi-john. Add the air lock.

Blood Plum Wine Experiment

I decided awhile ago to try another fruit wine after the Cheery and Lychee wine. I tried a very small portion of fruit to see just what kind of goodness I was dealing with.

This wine, Blood Plum, looked very red and very blood like when this whole thing started. Over time the blood plum (with honey) took on a new color and character.
After a few weeks I ended up with this. A pink colored liquid and a lot of crap on the bottom the demijohn which I am guess contains yeast cells, sediment, and dead yeast cells.YUM! :D

From here I siphoned off a bottle of wine which is currently in the refrigerator you see in the background. I did the same thing with the cheery and lychee wine when I thought it a complete failure only to try it weeks later and see it turned out not half bad!

So this photo here is the 2nd rack off which in the first I tried my damnedest to kill off all the yeast cells and let it settle for another week and half.

So while YES I should be racking off this wine to age properly over a few months, I don't feel this was the best size to test on. The surface area to liquid ratio is huge - so my area for failure is large. Might as well just drink the damn stuff :)
So I got a bottle. Yes that is where my story was going, and I dubiously pored out a glass of the stuff towards the bottom.
 I also had a small bit saved from the first racking off.

So to recap my thrilling tale. I now have 1 glass of wine from the end of the fermentation and before the racking off (transferring to another vessel and leaving behind sediment and yeast)  I also had 1 glass of newly aquired wine and 1 bottle of the stuff I put in the fridge.

The tasting beings!

Wow - Even though it is not clear and its a bit thick its nice! It smells good and tastes like a wine but with a nice sourness and plummy flavor at the end! HUZZUH!

But how did it compare to the glass I saved before the racking off? The wine before the racking off was very bitter and harsh. It had about the same constancy but it was words apart!

Stay tuned for the tasting of the plum wine from the bottle in a few weeks time