I started off by gathering my spices, honey, and equipment. A quick cleaning of my plastic carboy and other utensils. I then measured out my spices:
The upper left bowl has 2 teaspoons of coriander seeds. Proceeding clockwise, there is 4 teaspoons of cloves, 2 teaspoons of allspice, 1/2 nutmeg (shaved--the rasp is to the right), 4 cinnamon sticks, and 4 teabags of Earl Grey and 4 teabags of black tea. I put the first five ingredients in a mesh bag:
Then put it to a boil for 5 minutes. The pot is about 3/4 filled and holds about a half gallon of water when filled. After 5 minutes on the boil, I added the teabags which were knotted together and added 8 tablespoons of malodextrin to the mix and continued the boil for 5 more minutes:
While the mix was boiling, I took the time to fill the plastic carboy with 5 gallons of lukewarm water and also started hydrating my yeast:
The yeast is the Lalvin EC-1118 that I am currently using on all my Metheglin. This, again, is a personal preference and I am not sure at this time on the specifics on the tail end beyond what is written in the sources I use. The Metheglin tastes pretty good when I drink it and that may be the final say so for me.
After 10 minutes on the boil, I pulled out the mesh bag and the tea bags. I filled up the pot to the top and set it aside:
Er...those are brownies to the right. My superior, Robin, maintains her peak 'tude with occasional intake of chocolatey goodness in various forms. It makes life very good indeed and she allows me an eighth or so of the brownie pie now and then. Time to add 12 or so pounds of honey to the water. You may notice that honey does not want to leave completely out of the containers. I add the above spice mix to each container and swish it around. The hot spice mix will dilute and heat up the remaining honey and pour pretty well:
I only used half of the third container as each container was 5 pounds of honey. I'll add the remaining 2 1/2 pounds to the mix in a week or so when the perk goes down a bit. Total amount in the carboy now is a little over 6 gallons. This will work out on the tail end when I transfer it to a glass carboy and rack off the lees to ensure it is filled to the top of the glass one.
Once the honey and spices were added to the carboy, I stirred up the contents for several minutes to get a good blending. The yeast had about 12 to 15 minutes to re-hydrate in the meantime and it was time to pitch this into the carboy:
Once pitched in, I stirred the mix for about 3 minutes and then some to get the yeast well stirred in. I put the lid on and added an air trap:
And added it to my growing collection. I'll wait a couple hours to see if the mix starts perking. Once it does, I will add Fermaid-K and yeast nutrient that has been hydrated to the batch to get things going better. This seems to help the honey ferment more gustily and I will repeat this in a few weeks when I add more honey to the carboy. In the background are my other batches. The left is still fining. The middle is the second oldest and looks like my oldest batch done up in January on the right. I'm having thoughts on whether to use the Sparkaloid on my batches now as the older one has almost no lees and has been clear for almost a month. I may just bottle the contents when I get ready to transfer junior in the front to a glass carboy in a month or so.
I have heard that some folks like their carboys wrapped in a dark cloth to keep light off of the works. This corner you see stays darkened and I don't wrap mine at this point, but it would probably be a good idea to do that if it weren't in the location I use.
Oh! A quick blurb on PrivatE PreservE: Yep, that is how it is spelled on the label. This is an inert gas aerosol that helps preserve wine and is the same gasses used to keep air off of wine at wineries. I picked up a can on a wine tour last weekend. I got the can for $5.00 but the price at other wineries went up as high as $14.00. There is a web-site on the can: www.wineenthusiast.com that you should be able to go to to get yourself some if you want to try it out. I am going to give it a whirl on my carboys if the level lowers during racking and also use it in my bottling. I'll let you know the results when I can.
On a side note, Yesterday we had the dump of dumps of rain! Yakima does not get a great bounty of rain like the cities on the Washington coast, but we got a months worth of rain in a day according to our local news. That dump was over and done in about 20 minutes or so and it was impressive! The rest of the day was mild. I will need to check on our bees to see how they weathered the storm, but will wait a day or so for them to sort it out on their end. I don't want to open up their home while they are hunkered down inside.
Robin wants to go and play outside for a bit as she has hit the perfect brownie moment. Duty calls as does nature. See you soon folks!
