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CPL_Primeaux

CPL_Primeaux

NewBee
Registered Member
Mar 12, 2013
8
0
0
Louisiana
On most forums people like you to introduce yerself before posting. I browsed around and this seemed like the best place for this so here I go . My names Sam, I have been lurking here for months and finally started my first two gallons of mead about 5 days ago . A JAOM without the cinnamon and a strawberry melomel with cinnamon and cloves. They are fermenting their ass off right now and the smell in my closet makes me want to drink them NOW!

Anyway , Im big into camping and hunting(yeah Im a redneck), firearms and mead. I find home brewing mead very interesting messing with the different flavors and such. I cant wait to sample my brews and start making big 5 gallon batches at a time. I hope to learn a lot from you guys and gals.
 
Welcome to the forum, Sam! I'm relatively new around here myself, but there is definitely plenty to learn, and folks around here definitely seem friendly.
 
Welcome Sam!

Those sound like nice starts to your meading for sure! And lots of very friendly and very knowledgeable people around here! Feel free to search the forums and ask questions about things you don't understand, we are all learning all the time about how to make better meads!
 
Thanks guys. Im a little worried about the strawberry . At first I was having trouble finding recipes with cloves so I dropped 13 of them into the gallon ... Yes 13 whole cloves and wouldnt you know about an hour later I find a discussion about how those things are very potent for being so small and to only use 1-3 .... Shit ... I used about 14 of em. Thankfully , when the foaming started it spit about 8 of them out but I still have 5-6 in there so it may be a little clovey . Live you learn .

We will see and next time I will probably only use 1 per gallon. Im thinking if I throw more strawberries into the secondary I may be able to cover the clove taste. But I have never done this before so I dont want the berry flavor to BE OVERWHELMING. Maybe I will use a half pound in the secondary rather than a whole pound like I did in the primary . But checked on them earlier and they are still bubbling away. Not to much foam ontop but chuggin away
 
I haven't tried cloves in the ones i've done so far but i think your best bet would be to have a little taste next time you'll check your gravity with your hydrometer and if it's too potent you could also had more strawberries in the secondary or also more honey depending what you want to add.
 
I'd stick with the pound in the secondary. Strawberries are really tasty but require quite a bit of them to get a decent strawberry flavor into a mead. And since you're probably going to be in the war of the cloves, I say go for the full pound.

Worse case scenario with the cloves I think would be to whip up another gallon or two of JAOM sans cloves and blend them together.
 
I think you should be ok with that amount of clove, as long as you age it for a while. I split my first JAOM into two halves and racked half of it onto (among other spices) 4.5 cloves for 1/2 gallon of mead, left it there for 9 days, and had something almost completely unpalatable from the sheer overpowering quality of the clove. It was like the cloves were grabbing you by the tongue and beating the smeg out of you.

But I racked it back off of the spices on February 12th and it's now aged and mellowed to the point where you just get a nice, warm "holiday spice" flavor. There's still a little bit of bitterness in the aftertaste, but only if you chug the glass. A few more weeks of aging and it should be fine.
 
Yeah I like that blending, that seems like a great idea. I aint never thought to do that and its such a simple idea . Hopefully the berries in the secondary will mask a lot of it but with the ammountof clove I probably will need to blend when its all said and done.

Hmm I just thought, what if I blend my JAOM with the strawberry ? Hass anyone ever made mead with strawberrys and oranges? I cant see it being bad hell they got em mixed up in fruit trays. I think I may go ahead and do that in a little glass first and if its good Im just going to blend the two batches. I wanted to use the last of my honey to do a traditional batch next.
 
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Welcome to the addictio-- ahem, hobby!! ;D We can stop any time we want... oh, who am I kidding :rolleyes:

How potent those cloves end up being will depend on a couple of things, aging of the mead was already mentioned, how long they end up being in there, and the age of the cloves matters too, I can use a handful of the cloves I've got because they're like ten years old (when you only go through a few a year it takes a while!!), I can put in 5 or 6 without it being overpowering, and as folks have said, it does age out.
 
I dont know how old the cloves are but I assume they got a few years on their life.

I currently live in Abbeville LA. About 30 minutes south of Lafayette Louisiana.

Saturday I am going to start a 5 gallon batch . I was looking in my fridge, I have some orange juice but no more oranges . Could I substitute real orange with orange juice? If not I will have to go pick up some oranges from the store.
 
Most of the flavour you're going to get in an orange mead is going to come from the zest, not the juice, so you're probably gonna want to head off to the store again... or you could use the orange juice now, and then add just the zest of a few oranges for flavour a little later in the fermentation, when your usual shopping day comes up.
 
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