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Mead Lovers Digest #1252
Subject: Mead Lover's Digest #1252, 8 March 2006
From: mead-request@talisman.com
Mead Lover's Digest #1252 8 March 2006
Forum for Discussion of Mead Making and Consuming
Dick Dunn, Digest Janitor
Contents:
Re: Benzene and sodium benzoate (Dick Dunn)
Re: Mead Lover's Digest #1251, 2 March 2006 (dan@geer.org)
Seattle Area (Robert Keith Moore)
Let's keep it safe out there! ("Dan McFeeley")
Re: UF Mead ("Dan McFeeley")
Re: Capsicumels (Jim Johnston)
Re: Chlorine use and soaking (JazzboBob@aol.com)
Re: Re: UF Mead ("John Mealey")
NOTE: Digest appears when there is enough material to send one.
Send ONLY articles for the digest to mead@talisman.com.
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Subject: Re: Benzene and sodium benzoate
From: Dick Dunn <rcd@talisman.com>
Date: Thu, 2 Mar 2006 09:39:28 -0700
There's a relatively thorough commentary on this matter from Andrew Lea
in the latest Cider Digest. See
http://www.talisman.com/cider/curyr/1304
Basically it's old news in the beverage industry. Andrew's note is aimed
particularly at how it might affect cider, but still interesting.
- --
Dick Dunn rcd@talisman.com Hygiene, Colorado USA
------------------------------
Subject: Re: Mead Lover's Digest #1251, 2 March 2006
From: dan@geer.org
Date: Thu, 02 Mar 2006 11:58:01 -0500
Question: I've had a cyser made with supposedly all organic cider fail to
start fermentation despite everything I can test being correct. Of course,
I suspect unacknowledged benzoate or the like. Is there a confirming test
that does not require undue skill/equipment? Other suggestions welcome.
If there was benzoate or something equivalent, I would actually like
to push a complaint down the food chain but in that circumstance I want
non-circumstantial evidence. Thanks in advance.
- --dan
------------------------------
Subject: Seattle Area
From: Robert Keith Moore <Rob@ineedachef.com>
Date: Thu, 02 Mar 2006 10:25:38 -0800
Hey,
Just out of curiosity, I was wondering if any of you guys live near
Seattle, WA?
We have lots of micro-brew but not a lot of good mead.
Robert
------------------------------
Subject: Let's keep it safe out there!
From: "Dan McFeeley" <mcfeeley@keynet.net>
Date: Thu, 2 Mar 2006 13:44:57 -0600
An announcement just came through on AHA TechTalk which should be of
interest to readers on these forums. This is a new Blood Alcohol Calculator,
designed with the intent of providing better results than other calculators
out on the 'net.
Naturally, results of an blood alcohol calculator aren't 100% accurate, but
they can give good guidelines. The AHA version looks to be an improvement
over previous sites.
Take a look at the URL for the site for more info:
http://www.beertown.org/education/calc/bac/bac.aspx
<><><><><><><><><><>
<><><><><><><><>
Dan McFeeley
"Meon an phobail a thogail trid an chultur"
(The people's spirit is raised through culture)
------------------------------
Subject: Re: UF Mead
From: "Dan McFeeley" <mcfeeley@keynet.net>
Date: Thu, 2 Mar 2006 18:39:32 -0600
There was a brief review in the July 2000 issue of Bee Culture that reviewed
Robert Kime's application of ultrafiltration to meadmaking, "Thoroughly
Modern Mead" by Mary & Bill Weaver. Here's a synopsis of the article.
Kime was working with ultrafiltration as a means of clarifying apple juice
and, after being approached by a New York commercial beekeeper on problems
in meadmaking, decided to try the process out on honey. The beekeeper
had been heating a 500 gallon tank of honey must to a boil, boiling it for
one hour as recommended by many old recipes, and then having to deal with
a ten hour cooling period, because of the huge volume of honey must.
(from the article) "I almost fainted," said Bob. "Mead is diluted honey, and
all that heat and boiling would ruin honey, so it would probably ruin mead."
At first they tried a flash heater, which would heat to 220 degrees F and
then bring it down to 40 degrees in less than a minute. Although the mead
improved, it still had a harsh, astringent taste.
At that point, Kime decided to abandon heating altogether and use
ultrafiltration to remove the protein from the honey. The method worked
well, producing meads with a clean taste.
In the article, Kime compared length of fermentation time of UF meads v/s
boiled meads. "Without boiling, you have terrible haze problems," he said.
"Then, because boiling produces a harsh, astringent taste, meadmakers made
their mead with about 20% sugar, to try and cover up the astringency."
"You won't sell a lot of honey with 20% sugar," said Bob. "It's terribly,
terribly sweet."
Kime noted other problems with mead -- "I've had mead in my kitchen that
fermented for a year," said Bob. "Also some fermentations won't even
start or sometimes just stop at a very low alcohol level."
At the time, the researchers were working with a simple cause/effect
relationship. Boiled honey must yielded harsh astringent tasting mead.
UF meads, unheated, were clean tasting, with no astringency. UF removes
the protein, therefore the protein must be the cause.
It's a reasonable speculation, but certainly bears more testing. The logic
seems too limited.
I remember Paul Gatza addressing the crowd at the 2001 International Mead
Festival saying that some of the best meads he'd tried had been boiled.
Maybe they had been aged out, but nonetheless, he said they were good meads.
Year long ferments are a thing of the past. If they do, the meadmakers
talk with friends, come online, ask questions and before long they're
finishing out their meads in 4 to 6 weeks, sometimes sooner.
The late Roger Morse, also of the University of Cornell, had also shown
that boiling harms the fermentation, however, by adding more nutrients
to the boiled honey must, the mead fermented out in the same length of
time as unboiled honey musts. Apparently the boiling process had lowered
the nutrient content of the must, which, in turn, would have produced a
strained fermentation with off flavors.
Looking at Morse's results and comparing with the conclusions drawn from
the UF process in meadmaking, there seems to be a lot of unresolved aspects
of the role of proteins in honey and mead. Also -- has there been similar
research in protein content and wine taste? It might be interesting to
look that up and make comparisons with mead making.
Sadly, Robert Kime passed away a few years ago, so it seems that continuing
research into the hows and whys of UF in meadmaking has come to a halt.
There are still many questions to be answered.
[private note to Cam -- sorry I missed you at this year's
mead festival! Maybe next year]
<><><><><><><><><><>
<><><><><><><><>
Dan McFeeley
"Meon an phobail a thogail trid an chultur"
(The people's spirit is raised through culture)
------------------------------
Subject: Re: Capsicumels
From: Jim Johnston <jim@tervolk.com>
Date: Sat, 04 Mar 2006 07:54:11 -0600
The only time I attempted a capsicumel, I used about 10 "Garden
Salsa" peppers, home grown. These are a little smaller size than
Hatch chiles, but similar heat range. I smoked them with some
mesquite chips and added them to the secondary of a medium mesquite
honey mead. The color was a deep golden to pale amber, the aroma was
slightly smoky and the heat came on late, just a slight residual snap
after you already swallowed a sip. I wanted subtlety and got it. I
would recommend that if you are going to use chiles, go a more subtle
route. Even my friends who don't like hot food liked this one.
This mead paired really well with barbecue and also with jambalaya.
Jim
------------------------------
Subject: Re: Chlorine use and soaking
From: JazzboBob@aol.com
Date: Mon, 6 Mar 2006 13:06:25 EST
I agree with your post on the use of chlorine. My brewing times tend to be
an unpredictable and irregular. I fill up a bucket with bottles and let them
sit to soak and clean for weeks on end. I leave my carboy fermentors topped
off with a chlorine solution too. The only thing I would add is that after
a thorough rinse to remove any traces of chlorine, I do take the extra step
to sanitize my bottles with a brief iodophor soak on bottling day. They then
drip dry inverted on a bottle tree and remain sanitized without any chlorine
residue or risk or contamination from tap water.
Bob Grossman
In a message dated 2/10/2006 10:18:26 A.M. Eastern Standard Time,
mead-request@talisman.com writes:
Subject: over-chlorination shouldn't be a problem
From: ALAN K MEEKER <ameeker@mail.jhmi.edu>
Date: Thu, 09 Feb 2006 17:06:05 -0500
I'm one of those people who uses much more chlorine than is typically
reccomended for sanitization purposes. The reasons are several: 1)
chlorine is ridiculously cheap, so it costs little to use more 2) typical
household chlorine bleach inactivates over time in solution, and as it
reacts to organic matter (see #3 below), therefore if you want to have an
active solution for a decent length of time you can simply start out with
more bleach up front (or add more as time goes on) 3) although ideally
one would want to have clean materials going into the bleach solution,
which will then just serve to sanitize, this doesn't always happen. More
concentrated bleach does a great job of dislodging all manner of schmutz 4)
a higher concentration of bleach does a better job of killing things and
can actually sterilize rather than just sanitize.
------------------------------
Subject: Re: Re: UF Mead
From: "John Mealey" <mealey@gw.grand.k12.ut.us>
Date: Thu, 02 Mar 2006 10:38:24 -0700
<original message>
Subject: Re: UF Mead
From: Cam Graham <meadmaker@middlemountainmead.com>
Date: Sun, 26 Feb 2006 10:19:30 -0800 (PST)
Cam said:
There are many holes in my knowledge. For instance, I'd be interested
to know if phenols really do age out - anybody have knowledge of that?
If so, I guess that would explain a lot of the "meads improve with
age".
Wouldn't it be logical for the esterfication process (a common reaction
of an alcohol or phenol and an acid) that produces esters, which react
with oxygen to form chemicals which are beneficial flavoring and aroma
enhancing agents, among other things? In fact to quote "Details Of The
Wine Making Process" at
http://www.grapeescape.com/details.htm "...the wine is racked into a
clean carboy for the final time. The wine will now go through a process
of esterfication in which the five different types of acids in the wine
react with the higher alcohols in the wine in the presence of O2 to form
esters. The esters will form until all oxygen is consumed. The
polyphenolics in the wine react with the esters to form another group of
chemicals which have proven to be beneficial to the human circulatory
system. These chemicals cause the platelets in the blood stream to not
adhere to the lining of the system and pass on to be eliminated..." That
might explain why aging improves the flavor of wine (including mead) as
these chemical processes continue for the aging period; and why the
ultra filtration process (before fermentation) would prevent the
formation of phenols, perhaps removing the need to age the product.
John
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End of Mead Lover's Digest #1252
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