Foraging for Food

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Linden flowers cold steeping for a upcoming mead. Fragrance is honey melon meets pear blossoms. The bees go nuts for these flowers, lucky to have a good stand of them on the property.

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Honey, Orange Blossom and Sage ((Mostly what I had on hand), Linden flowers steeped in cold water, plus some separate quantity steeped in hot water, along with garden fresh Lemon Balm leaves and Yaupon leaves. Lalvin 71-B yeast. Doesn’t take long the yeast to do their thing, by 5 hours post pitch they are already converting Fructose and Glucose in honey into CO2 and ethanol. I’ll feed the yeast a little extra nitrogen for a few days to keep them happy. Maybe after a rack or two, a little degassing, some tweaking on the honey and herbs, I’ll have something tasty to enjoy in a year. Mead is definitely slow food.

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Same mead, now 4 weeks post pitch. Added hibiscus tea and magnolia petal syrup. Looks pretty enough. Hibiscus tea works well on adding a pretty hue and a little pleasant citrusy note. Don’t know about the magnolia syrup. Syrup has spicy and warm notes like ginger.

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Magnolia petal, Basswood blossom metheglin in the bottles. Mustang Grape Pyment in the secondary Carboy now about 3 weeks post pitch. Macerated ripe and carefully picked by myself the crushed grapes only, no stems, for a few hours, then pushed the resulting juice through cheesecloth and then a fine sieve. Racked off most of the gross lees a week after the pitch.

Wonderful smell coming out of the airlock. This will hopefully be like a fruity rose. Going to pack a punch, though. These mustang grapes are Malic acid bombs. Think sweet tarts candy without much sugar. I sampled a teensy bit a couple of days ago and it’s delicious, heady with alcohol, but the flavor is there.

[bower]

Been a long time since I made any brews but it was a lot of fun when we did.
My brother still talks about the gooseberry and yarrow wine he and I drank a little too much of one Christmas, and neither of us got the flu that everyone else was suffering from. What a headache though!

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I’m of the mind that moderate alcohol consumption may offer some protection from nasty viruses. I haven’t quite nailed down the definitive results just yet so the research continues!

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I opened the last bottle of my first homemade mead last night. I made this mead in July 2020 with foraged beachside dewberries my son and I picked in April of 2020 then froze. A gallon batch yields four 750 ml bottles. I don’t stabilize meaning add Potassium Metabisulfite a.k.a. Campen tablets or Potassium Sorbate to my meads or take any other measures such as pasteurization. These are country wines, pétillant-naturel in their way. A tissue paper thin layer of yeast rest on the bottom of the bottle. Wines way back when all tended to have a little residual yeast in the bottle. Nowadays, these yeast are filtered out. Fine yeast lees in a bottle or cask, in moderation,tend to impart mouthfeel and other desirable attributes plus they are oxygen scavengers protecting wine from becoming oxidized.

The mead itself is clear and very lightly effervescent. All wine has a degree of dissolved CO2 in it left over from the yeast activity. If you ever had a wine with a flat, dead aspect, it likely didn’t have enough dissolved CO2. That CO2 also helps fight unwanted oxidation. But, wines change over time as always there’s some inevitable and even desired micro oxidation. My mead had some tannic bitterness from the seeds of the blackberries in all likelihood and this softened as time when on. The first bottle consumed a few months after bottling the bitter finish was noticeable and a bit distracting, but by the year mark, that bitterness is almost imperceptible and pleasant. Wines have a balance of acid, alcohol, sugar, tannin, and water.

This mead ended up with a nice balance. It fermented very dry, was cold crashed and a very little bit of honey was then added and then the mead was bottled, in pressure capable bottles, accounting for some of the extra CO2. With the bitterness dropping, a perception of sweetness emerged, nothing cloying, and the honey nose has intensified over time. The first bottle I had to drop a sugar cube in the glass to counteract the bitter nature and that worked wonders. So did letting it warm up a bit into cellar temperature rather than refrigerated temperature. This last bottle needed no added sugar. A pleasant honey scented, balanced rose like wine it became.

[worth1]

To my tastes I have had bad wine and good wine.
None of it had anything to do with price.
I simply drink what I like.
If it is in poor taste to the wealthy thin so be it.
The sangria I buy is effervescent when first opened.
Some wine gives me indigestion so bad at first swallow I can't drink it.

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The appeal of these meads for me is foraging or growing some of the ingredients then trying to make something enjoyable without a lot of intervention that modern wineries, breweries, meaderies practice, micron filtering, sulfite additions, and various other manipulation. There is a lot I can do to influence the meads I’m making, though, and I don’t have to follow any set rules that might constrict the commercial establishments. Add flowers, teas, herbs, etc. it was all once done 100’s of years ago and still is done today, but the commercial people have constraints that maybe I don’t have. I’m on my sixth mead now. Only one was not enjoyable on its own and there are ways to incorporate the alcohol produced in a less than enjoyable fermentation so that it doesn’t get wasted. Allegedly, this might require some other processing involving heat, a closed system and a condenser, but whose to say?

I don’t drink much commercially produced wine. My wife likes a specific varietal, Sauvignon Blanc from a specific region, Marlborough, New Zealand. Those wines are typically retail around the $10/bottle. Some a little less, some a bit more, that on the low end. They are dry and have a lot of acidity with grapefruit, gooseberry, grass, and other tropical flavors abounding. Sometimes, there’s a distinct mosquito spray taste about them that hits me but not her.

I had a Caymus Red wine once, (I wasn’t paying) and it was good. I’ve had a few other mostly forgotten higher end wines. But, if I had $80 or $100 or more extra bucks, I’d be looking to spend it elsewhere than on higher end wine.

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For instance, a person can purchase a white dog at any major liquor store now and then go about making there own additions to this, wood toasted at various temperatures. Toasted Oak Wood soaked in a mead or wine, then added to the white dog, a white dog being the clear spirit that every whisky or bourbon in the world begins its distilled life as. Most scotch is aged in bourbon barrels purchased from the major bourbon makers. Bourbon, by definition, must be aged in New Charred Oak barrels so they cannot be reused by the bourbon makers. These barrels get shipped to Scotland and then that whisky there gets put into the used bourbon barrels to age. Sometimes, the whisky is then transferred into Sherry barrels from Spain or Portugal or perhaps other casks usedto age other wines and spirits.

Most All spirits come out of the still clear, if they don’t something likely went wrong. Aging in or on various wood imparts color and a host of other attributes. Toasting and charring wood changesthe wood on a molecular level and converts lignin, cellulose and hemicellulose into complex sugars and such. No particular rule it has to be Oak unless you are a commercial maker that has to adhere to the rules set forth to be called a bourbon, single malt,or a rye. A white dog becomes a whisky or a brandy the moment it touches wood. Grain is the fuel source for whisky. Fruit for brandy. Any fruit can be used to make a brandy or eau de vie. Cherrywood can be used to age a spirit. Acacia, Chestnut is said to be a fabulous wood to age a spirit on, but good luck finding American Chestnut. It went extinct over 100 years ago. People buy chestnut furniture just to scavenge wood to age spirits on.

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https://www.mountvernon.org/the-estate- ... e-whiskey/

George Washington, our first President, made whisky at Mount Vernon. Above is a link to his Mash Bill. 60% Rye, 35% Corn, 5% Barley.

[worth1]

Green or colored alcohol from a still is not good.
It's poison.

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Yep, copper salts aren’t something you want to injest in quantity. The body needs a tiny amount of copper, but a blue or green tinted condensate is going to greatly exceed what the body needs. Anything really is a toxin in sufficient quantities. Vitamin D is either a life giver or rat poison, the dose is the difference. Iron, the same thing. Iron supplements can kill a person if they overdose on it.

[bower]

The strict regulations on distilling came in because of bad liquor being sold, where they failed to filter off or throw away that green crap that comes out first. At least, that's how it goes iirc if you're using a modified fire extinguisher and a coil of copper pipe.
I never heard the term 'white dog' but for legitimate business you can purchase plain spirits at 98% or so here.
Personally I use a plain vodka to extract medicines and tasty things. The 40% ethanol is a good place to be with edible herb extracts, has a very benign profile including some anti-inflammatory triterpenes that are insoluble in pure water or pure ethanol. I have made some stuff with higher proof, and for some things it is necessary, but TBH I always preferred the lower proof products. The profile at high proof shifts toward the essential oils, and to my mind they are best represented as a very light touch, not dominating.

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White dog is just the whisky that comes straight out of the still and hasn’t been put on or in wood barrels to age yet. There are some rules if it is to be a bourbon, and maybe for some of the other whiskies as well, on how high it can be on the Alcohol by volume.

https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/ ... le/screech

Screech was the Rum of Newfoundland and Labrador.

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Another one. Foraged blackberries along with some foraged elderberries. Vigorous fermentation for four hours post pitch. Bottled Mustang Grape Pyment, this one needs to age.

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Found a few Chanterelles today. Son is out scouting for more. Turk’s cap fruit just showing up, too early for those. Freezing them for now, maybe they will find there way into a mead once I get a bunch.

Racked over the Blackberry Melomel to a secondary container. Fermented dry after 10 days in the primary. Added the strained juice from about a pound of blackberries and another 5-6 ounces of honey, plus a little wild berry tea to make up the volume losses from racking. Added toasted oak cubes in there also.

Flavor was good on the sample. Of course, heavy on yeasty flavors 10 days after the inception, but beneath that yeast good berry flavors are present with nothing harsh or grating. This effort shows promise. The toasted oak ought to add another layer of pleasing tannins in time.

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Lots more chanterelles today. Found a new area. Found some passion fruit, but it wasn’t yet ripe. Good foraging day.

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More finds from today. Maypops, Passiflora incarnata, the native Passion flower fruit. These aren’t quite ripe. Creeping cucumber also in there.

[bower]

Where I lived in South America, passion fruit is called maracuya, I believe. It is the most delicious fruit I ever tasted. Even better than mango, which is a major fave. We do get mangoes in the supermarket here but never see passion fruit. A distant memory for me.