For my Marine friend returning home: Viking Blood Mead!!!

[Teufel Hunden]

My good friend is in Europe somewhere right now on his last deployment. We became friends about midway through my career, and deployed together to Iraq in 2006. For his triumphant return in a few months, I figured what better than mead?! I picked Viking Blood because it sounded delicious, and is fitting given his heritage from that part of the world and his personal interests.




Pitched the yeast about 5 minutes before this pic.


I used a recipe I found on a different forum from a very friendly fellow from Norway.

12 Liter Cherry Juice
4 Liter good Water
1 Kilo Cherrys
2 Kilo Sugar
2 Kilo Woodhoney
20ml Antigel Enzym
8 gr.yeastnutrisal
1 Päk. Burgund Yeast

I managed to get some Forest Honey on Amazon... it's fairly dark and has a very interesting flavor.. very unlike the usual honey varieties I use for mead. I made a few changes to the recipe besides dividing it down for a 1 gallon batch. I used all cherry juice and no water, I used a little extra honey and a little less sugar (500g honey, 300g sugar, instead of equal parts), and I left the cherries for the secondary... though I'm not sure if he intended them to be in the primary or what. OG was ~1.120

The yeast I used was Lalvin RC 212.. the first time I've used this type, and the first time I've used a Burgundy yeast at all.


Here she is 5 days later, coming along quite well.



Hopefully it's a bit of a deeper red once it clears and all that. If not, as long as it's delicious I'm happy.


I'll rack it onto some sweet cherries a couple days before the fermentation stops, so the flavors there will be a bit more subtle in the end. By then it'll be somewhat dry from the low OG and and the 16% ABV tolerance of that yeast, so I'll back sweeten it with a little more forest honey.