In which Ricky the Meadmaker answers questions about fermenting caramelized sugars, the best ways to add vanilla to mead, what would happen if you “carbonated” with nitrous oxide, and more!
What the Heck is Nitro?
Mead Varieties Poster
The Ability of Brett to Ferment Caramel – The Mad Fermentationist
As many of you have undoubtedly heard, we were burgled. Last weekend, a monster who hates mead and love and community, invaded our mead hall, shattered a window, broke our doors, and took one bottle of mead. And people have wanted to know, are we going to do something about this? The answer is we're not going to go out seeking justice. We're not vigilantes, but we've been looking at the wisdom of the ancients to decide what to do to keep our meat Hall safe. And we're primarily referring to the Seamus Haney translation.
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.
The first question this week comes from Wesley. Wesley wants to make a bochet, though he wrote brochet which is like a bochet where you add lacrosse balls to it. A bochet is a mead made with a caramelized honey, and he wanted to know if the caramelized honey would have trouble fermenting once you caramelize it. Does it do something to the sugars that makes it so it can't ferment? The answer is, according to my friend Michael Thomas Meyer, better known as the Mad Fermentationist, caramelized sugars may resist fermentation or be unfermentable by common strains of yeast, the bacteria will usually deal with them.
The next question is an easy one. It comes from Scott. Scott down in Georgia wants to know if I'd be willing to ship him a slant of our house strain of yeast for him to play around with, and the answer is I would absolutely ship you a slant of our house strain of yeast if we still used one, but about half of a year back, we switched to D47. So, if you want to make mead like me, D47 can be purchased at your local homebrew store.
For those of you who are watching me on the big screen and can see that this is a layer drink, you're probably wondering what it is. It is Really Old Wayfarer mixed with creatine. I call it a Nordic Strong Man.
Next question is a twofer. Two different people asked about vanilla beans this week and I thought vanilla beans are enough different from all the other spices that I've talked about in the past that it's worth discussing. In particular, how do you add vanilla beans to mead? Now, if you throw the whole bean in without cutting it, without scraping it, without doing anything, it's usually pretty gross. Don't do that. Other than that, there are a lot of different ways to do it. A lot of people like to chop it up and throw it in. And Azezeal was putting it in vodka. He tasted the vodka and realized he didn't really like the taste of it. What if that vodka flavored his mead? Is there a liquor that would be better, and I really like this approach because, no, in your full batch of mead, you're not going to taste the vodka burn. But a lot of people think that vodka is the best way to get their spices, their cinnamon, their vanilla, their cocoa into their batch of mead. But if you want to add something cool, vanilla and bourbon go beautifully together. Soak your vanilla beans in that, then pour the whole thing in, chunks and all. Some people like to put rum in. The world is your oyster when it comes to liquor and vanilla beans.
That's my dream meal. Oysters, liquor and vanilla beans. Oh my god. What am I doing with my life? We have a follow up from Paul about something about sherry back in Episode 68. It was like a million years ago or a few weeks or whatever. I don't remember. Either way, Paul was worried that he had managed to oxidize his mead post fermentation and that it was going to have some gross sherry-like flavors and would they go away? And the answer is, he put two gallons of mead into a three-gallon carboy. That's half that volume. And so yes, our friend Paul now has honey sherry and he says it's great as far as honey sherry goes, but he wasn't after honey sherry. So, a good reminder to us all: either in secondary, make sure you have the right size vessel or do like a nitrogen or CO2 purge before you put your mead in there.
Our last question this week comes from Quinn, and it's kind of related, oddly enough to Paul. Quinn wanted to know if you could carbonate in mead with nitrous oxide? The answer is probably not legally, I think it might be a controlled substance, whippets being an issue in our culture in general. Apparently, someone told me about it, looked up what whippets are. Turns out you can shoot cream up your nose and out the other nostril. Which seems like a lot of fun but it isn't the purpose of a whippet. Anyway, could you use nitrous oxide in your mead in place of CO2 for carbonation? The answer is, technically yes. It'd be a really bad idea, because it does dissolve in water. And it has an oxidative reaction, almost as strong as pure oxygen. So, you would not be laughing, you would be crying, because your entire batch would then taste like paper and sherry, instead of getting you drunk and high. So anyway, yes, you could do it, Quinn, but please don't. That's our last question this week. I just need to send it over to Ricky with our Word of the Week. Ricky, could you tell us a little bit about nitrogen in general?
Thank you, Ricky. I will talk about whatever I want to talk about. You're just lucky. I want to talk about nitrogen this morning and why and God's name are you drinking Nordic Strong Men at this hour? This week's word is nitrogen. In the past, we've talked about nitrous, beer gas, and a bunch of other things. But nitrogen, this often-misunderstood atom makes up the majority of our atmosphere, but almost never by itself. Nitrogen does not like to hang out solo. In fact, nitrogen bonds with nitrogen into N2, making the strongest diatomic bond known in chemistry, meaning that it's almost impossible to break apart, which is why when you put nitrogen into your beer or mead or whatever else, it pushes out in a very funny way and immediately comes out of solution because it does not like to bond to anything else. N2O, which can be formed in another structure, is nitrous oxide. Because nitrogen, N2 is so strong, it would love to give that oxygen up and will to whatever will take it, which is your beverage in this case, which is why it oxidizes so readily.
Nitrogen. It's our Word of the Week and the end of our show. Keep sending your questions and I'll get to them as soon as possible. Cheers.
