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Prickely Pear Mead
I have a huge cactus out in my front yard and this was a great year for prickely pears. I remembered reading a recipe in Charlie Papazian's book The Joy of Homebrewing for a PP mead. So I dusted his book off and found the recipe. Wow it's a huge mead with 20lb of honey in a 5 gal batch my starting gravity was about 1.145 and the Pears turned into a huge purple mess. all in all it seems like it was not worth the trouble next year i might just let them fall off and rot on the ground like every year earlier. I guess that depends on how well this mead turns out. Here's the brewday
First I went out and collected all the plump purple pears I could get. About 5 pounds worth.
Then I got the blender out. I put about 10-15 pears in the blender at a time and covered with hot water and ran it until smooth dump it into my pot on the stove and go again until they were all into the brewpot.
Charlie calls for a 2 1/2 hour boil on the Pear water mix to drive off some of the nasty stuff in the pears. I was able to skim off a bunch of the nasty looking stuff that floated to the surface.
While the pears were boiling away I got all that honey out and poured it and about 3 gal of water into another larger brewpot. I heated the whole thing to about 180 and let sit for a half hour or so. I did that because I don't trust my tap water to be clean, and it helped all that honey dissolve. Then the honey pot went into an ice bath to cool and dumped into a cleaned and sanitized 6 1/2 gal carboy.
Once the PP boil time was up that pot went into the ice bath as well and then strained into the honey carboy.
Once all that was left in the strainer was chunks I got some cold bottled water and topped off the carboy to about 5 gals. Pitched my yeast (Wyeast 4632 dry mead) and started cleaning up the giant purple sticky mess in the kitchen before my wife got home.
all in all an interesting experiment but one that I might not be willing to try again. If I did I think that I would ditch the boil of the Prickly Pears and just blend them up, add campden tabs, and pectin and use only about 14-15 pounds of honey. I wanted to try this for the first time really close to the recipe and then make changes later once i have some sort of base line to go by.
another fun brewday experiment. I am interested in how this turns out
ID
I'm jealous. I've always wanted to make this mead since reading Charlie P's book but unfortunately prickly pears are hard to come by in MA. Keep us updated, I'd love to see how it looks in the bottle and glass.
Ferment is starting veeerrrrryyyyy slowly. I checked the PH this morning and it was right on at about 5 but i forgot that I was out of yeast nutrient so I think that I'll get some and add it tomorrow when i get home from work.
ID
Meads are one of those things that you set aside and forget about and then a year later you stumble upon and bottle. I made a couple of meads when I first started brewing and they came out terrible... well I guess I should try one before I say that but I haven't touched them in a year or two. Anyways, my point is that they take forever to ferment. Keep the temp stable and add yeast nutrient. When you add the yeast nutrient it'll probably foam like crazy because your creating a ton of nucleation points.
I added yeast nutrient to about a half cup o water and let it sit on the stove at 180+ for a half hour or so then added it to my mead. Also I gave it a shot of O2 and added another 2 packets of yeast and now we are rocking and rolling. Airlock is bubbling away. Original Gravity was really high and I forgot the O2 and Yeast nutrient hence the shotgun approach. Somethings gonna hit it
Thanks again FPB
ID
mead really needs the nutrients. Honey doesn't have much free amino nitrogen, which yeast need. at least according to the compleat meadmaker book.
Yeah I always put in the Yeast Nutrient when I do meads, I just forgot this time. And after sitting around watching the (must?) do nothing for two days I added the YN and it took off after that.
ID
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