It didn’t take long to become a fermentation fanatic. In November I had some deeply caramelized honey. When I was trying to remove the wax capping from the fall honey harvest I used the oven to melt the wax through a cheese cloth. This removes all the debris and renders the wax usable for things like lip balm or moisturizing salve. The spoils of this was about a gallon (4 Litres) of dark dark honey. I didn’t want to throw out good honey, but there was a lot of it and it was not quite burnt, but not quite good either. There is Mead style called a bochet that uses caramelized honey. I joined some interest groups online (mostly Facebook) and read as much as I could before I started. I mixed the honey with some D47 strain yeast, some dechlorinized tap water and I now have 5 gallons of mead bubbling away in a borrowed wine fermentor. The mead should finish around 14% alcohol (yikes, might need to be watered down).
From this first attempt at mead I now have borrowed more equipment and have two other meads on the go. A Blackberry Hydromel, which is a lower alcohol mead that just uses less honey and more water, and a Cyser which uses apples in the brewing process. The problem with meads are that they can take a year or longer to finish to the point that they are tasty. You can check out my basic mead making post here. Seeing how easy it was to ferment things and already making my fair share of sourdough breads I was ready to see what else I could ferment.
Stay tunes I will be posting my attempt at Kombucha, Jun Tea, and a Ginger Bug….my wife gets back in three days I better get moving.
Read more about my Mead adventure here
Update… June 2020
I currently have a very strong Kombucha SCOBY that is making me 6 bottles of Kombucha per week. I am getting close to being able to split it and continue on with my experiment to slowly turn a Kombucha SCOBY into a Jun Tea SCOBY.
My new adventure is to try fermented ketchup. Fermented ketchup requires a fermented brine. I decided on Sauerkraut because it seemed like the easiest and most delicious path. My Sauerkraut is currently bubbling away in a homemade fermertor that I made out of a wide mouth mason jar, an airlock, and a plastic bushing. The link I have provided is from amazon, I did not use this product but it looks great. I used a jar, lid, and airlock I already had. I also went to our local brewing supply shop to get the plastic bushing that goes in the airlock and lid. Using the metal lid may not have been such a great idea so I am anxiously awaiting this order from amazon.
Once my sauerkraut is complete I will (first eat the kraut, likely on some delicious deer sausage) use the brine as a fermenting agent in my homemade fermented ketchup.
