Ask the Meadmaker Ep. 57 – Recipes are Important

It seems like every Ask the Meadmaker, I'm in a different place. This time, the whole bar moved like 20 linear feet. I know that there's no real good way to tell. You'll have to trust me.

Welcome to Ask the Meadmaker, where I, Ricky the Meadmaker, answer your questions about mead making, mead drinking, mead brewing, and really any question you're willing to send to me. 

I'm going to start off with some recipe questions this week. Azazeal wants to brew a chocolate mead and he wants to know my thoughts on the subject. He once heard that you need high levels of cocoa fat to make a good chocolate. Is that true for fermented beverages? The answer is fermented beverages and fat do not mix. I, when adding cocoa to my recipes, like to use a high-quality cocoa extract. I find it gets the most cocoa flavor in and doesn't separate back out of solution. 

What the heck, let's do two from Azazeal. He wants to know about adding plums to a different recipe, though chocolate and plum could work very nicely together. He is concerned that if he adds the plums with the peels on, he will have too much in the way of tannin, which would give it an acerbic mouthfeel. He's afraid that if he doesn't have the skins, it won't taste enough like plums. He wants to know what my thoughts are. The last time I made something with plums, I was nine years old, and the blender had just come into my life. So, I thought I'm going to make a smoothie. And I put a whole bunch of ice and like one plum into my parents' blender. The ice stuck. The plum juice tasted like water. The blades, when they ground to a stop, actually lit my parents' blender on fire. And to this day, I've never worked with plums again. Does that answer your question? 

[A TEMENDOUS WHOOSH IS HEARD OFFSTAGE] Have you ever wondered what that sound is? It's F16s that fly over. This is one of the reasons we're looking for new places to shoot ask the meadmaker. 

Gene, whose feelings about Homestar Runner appear to be akin to my own, wanted to know if I check my email on a copy like Strong Bad. The answer is no. I check my email on paper. That's what I have staff for: to print out emails and hand them to me. For those of you who are worried about the environmental impact of my printing out every single one of my emails, know this: I get about seven emails a week and I have a pet forest that I take care of in Ripton, Vermont, so I make up for it. 

Our next question comes from Jenny, who has another recipe question. She wants to work with elderberries, and she wanted to know if I prefer dry elderberries, or juice, or fresh elderberries? And the answer is, I do brew with elderberries. Unlike the plum disaster of my youth, I never had an issue with elderberries. And I love them. I've always used either fresh-pressed, or cans of the juice. Dry elderberries, for some reason, sort of smell like old gym socks. I've never been clear as to why, but it's not a flavor profile I felt like adding to one of my beverages. Jenny in her email also mentioned that she marathoned all of my episodes. Did you know if you're drinking while you do it, it's technically binge watching?

Our next question comes from Kurt, who wants to back-sweeten some of his meads, which he is sure as heck allowed to, if he wants. Basically, he has an issue. He has batches that range from five gallons to fifty gallons and he wants to cold crash them but can't. Cold crashing is where you quickly drop the temperature of a fermented beverage to flocculate (precipitate) out the yeast so that you can add sugar and the yeast won't just turn into more alcohol. Part of the problem is that's not always an effective solution. And you may get refermentation in your bottle, keg, etc. The other problem is he can't cold crash something as large as fifty gallons. He doesn't have the equipment to do it. So, the question is, how can he back sweeten? The answer is, you're either going to have to boil your fermented mead, which is gross, don't do it, or you're going to need to do something like add sulfites. 

Our last question this week comes from Greg, who wrote us a bunch of questions recently, and this last question was how big are your hands? They look enormous in one episode of Ask the Meadmaker. And I guess the answer is, a) I've never had any complaints, and b) like normal size, considering I'm six foot four, which means big. So, there you have it. Big hands, big gloves as they say. 

That was our last question of the week. I just need to send it over to Ricky with our word of the week. Ricky?