Why So Hot?
TRANSCRIPT
Why am I wearing this ridiculous get up? [RICKY IS DRESSED IN A FLANNEL CAP AND AN OLD JACKET] You might wonder, because, between you, my love of you, and my daughter getting a nap inside the house, is me shooting this episode of Ask the Meadmaker inside a freezing cold woodshed.
Welcome 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. Our first question today comes from Infinite Fretboard, which is a great name if that's your real name, and a pretty good handle if it's not. He wants to know why we have to chill our fermentations if we ferment them all the way up at 86˚F. The answer is: the metabolic activity of yeast in a fermentation the size of ours can get up well above 100˚F, actually killing the yeast in solution.
Mike wants to know if we have to put nutritional information on the back of our cans of mead. If not, why not? If so, how do we go about getting it? The answer is we have not had to heretofore because we were not making enough. But in the coming years, all of our products are going to have nutritional information on them using a local company called Zymology Lab.
Vinyl D wants to know if I'm ever going to make any other episodes that are actually about mead making or just answer questions from morons like him. And Vinyl D, I like to think I do both.
Apparently, someone submitted her question to the wrong form, because Nicole wants to know if we can tell her anything else about the cornhole competition we're hosting this weekend because she and her friends love cornhole. I'm glad to hear you love cornhole. The problem is, she not only submitted this question to the Ask the Meadmaker files, but it also was in October of 2017, which is the last time we had a cornhole tournament. So, sorry about that, Nicole.
Our last question this week comes from Nick. And, in classic Ricky the Meadmaker style. I don't have an answer to his question, but it's actually something that has fascinated me for years. He wants to know about using cocoa powder as a yeast nutrient. He was looking at the profile of it, the minerals, the proteins, and the other things that are in cocoa and comparing them to known nutrient profiles. He realized they're almost the same. Could you use cocoa powder in place of yeast nutrient? And the answer is, I don't know. But if you've done that, and I bet some of you have because a lot of you write to me, let me know, send it in, and we'll talk about it in a future episode.
That was our last question this week. And it was a really good one. Thank you, Nick. Keep sending them and I'll get to them as soon as possible. Cheers.
