The Best Gifts Are Hand Crafted

[Teufel Hunden]

My wife's birthday was yesterday, and I presented her with this:



Caramel Apple Cyser (which is Mead made with apple cider instead of water). I made her a gallon of it, so there's 4 others to go with it. The map in the background is an old map of Breconshire in Wales from 1693.

I steeped some crystal malt in the cider, then used local wildflower honey. After it finished fermenting, I back sweetened it a bit with some buckwheat honey.


It's only 4 months old at this point, which is very young for a mead, so we're letting it age for a couple months before trying a bottle. If she likes it, I might just make 5 gallons for her next year.

[Llama]

Very nice! I just started home brewing this year and I'm looking forward to my first mead. Beautiful label, too!

[tulloch]

That looks like a great gift. Congratulations to you.

[Seawolf]

Halo!

So...is there a recipe for this brew?

Moran taing,

Seawolf

[MacNobody]

Tagging this thread for a recipe!

[Teufel Hunden]

The recipe is for 5 gallons

-4 Gallons apple juice or cider
-Your preference here. I used Williams Sonoma 5 Apple Cider this time.
-2 lbs Dry Malt Extract
-3 lbs 60L Crystal malt
-9 lbs Honey.
-Any honey will do, I used local wildflower. Preferably you'd like it to be a nice light, mild honey
-2 lbs Buckwheat Honey.
-Again, any honey will do, I used buckwheat because I wanted that bold flavor.
-2 vanilla beans

Yeast: Lalvin K1v1116


Steep grains in 1.5 gallons of apple juice at 155F for 45 minutes and remove from heat. Stir in the DME and honey. Rinse grain sack with 1/2 gallon apple juice. Add the remainder of the apple juice. Pitch yeast. Starting gravity should be around 1.120

This should ferment out to 1.012 or so. Rack to secondary and add vanilla beans. Allow to remain in the secondary for about a month.

Rack again onto buckwheat honey and 2 1/2t potassium sorbate to stabilize. You can also add some campden tablets now if you choose, and a clarifying agent as well. Or just let it clear up the old fashioned way.

Bulk age preferably 6 months to 1 year before bottling. I cheated this part since I started making it too late in the year.

[Deirachel]

Interesting to see you use malt. My wife and I use wine yeasts. Have you tried that? If so, what do you think about the differences in flavor?

[Teufel Hunden]

Interesting to see you use malt. My wife and I use wine yeasts. Have you tried that? If so, what do you think about the differences in flavor?

The Caramel Malt is partly what gives this mead the interesting flavor you're after. I'm not sure what you mean with the rest of your post though, Lalvin K1v1116 is wine yeast.

http://www.lalvinyeast.com/images/li...V-K1_Yeast.pdf

[Deirachel]

Didn't see that.... I was looking for it in the main ingredients list.