Triple-Berry-Cherry Vikings Blood Mead

Mead is my favorite type of wine. It has a much richer flavor and is more viscous than regular wine. This mead started, like most of my brewing, with an existing online recipe. I use the scientific method to record the challenges encountered in the brewing process and modify the overall flavor. This specific recipe was called Triple-Berry-Cherry Vikings Blood Mead. The title “triple-berry-cherry” comes from a Walmart bag of frozen fruit of the same name, which delivers much of the meads’ fruity flavor. The term “vikings blood” comes from a historical Scandinavian mead recipe in which the cherries create a dark red color, similar to that of blood. The recipe also called for hibiscus tea, which maintained a prominent flavor in the final product despite the other strongly flavored ingredients.

The first step was to thaw the frozen fruit. While that was going on, I boiled water to make the tea. I then weighed out the tea leaves and the honey. It is important to be precise, especially with the honey, because the sugars will be converted into alcohol and there is only a specific threshold the yeast can handle. If there is too much sugar the yeast will not be able to survive. If there is too little sugar, it won’t produce enough alcohol, reducing the shelf life. A product under 9% alcohol by volume can even be susceptible to vinegar contamination. This “hobby” quickly becomes complex chemistry if you allow it to. At its simplest form, producing alcohol is as simple as having water, sugar, yeast, and oxygen. The yeast consumes sugar and oxygen to produce alcohol and carbon dioxide. As you make it more complex you can factor in sugar and alcohol concentrations using a hydrometer, balance the pH, remove sediment, use ascorbic acid to break down fruit, adjust the temperature and length of time you ferment for, and more.

Returning to the creation of the mead, I then added the tea leaves to boiling water for a fixed amount of time before removing them. I poured the boiling hot tea over the frozen fruit to help break it down and make it easier for the yeast to digest. I then added cold water to bring the temperature down to a safe climate for the yeast to live in. Finally, I slowly added the honey, testing with the hydrometer until I reached the potential alcohol reading I wanted as an end product. I mixed thoroughly to incorporate as much oxygen as possible, then put it into a food safe container with an air lock so that it could release the CO2 without building up pressure in the container. I then set it in a room temperature location that was in shadow so that the yeast could do their work. Each day I would sanitize a metal spoon and press the fruit down into the fermenting liquid, coating it with alcohol to prevent mold from growing and allow yeast to fully feed on all of the fruit. After a predetermined number of days had elapsed and the hydrometer indicated that there were no fermentable sugars left, I syphoned off the liquid and pressed the fruit before disposing of it for the local animals to consume. It’s not well known, but animals do eat fermented fruit from time to time in the wild and I didn’t want it to just end up in a landfill. This way the seeds have a chance to be redeposited into nature.

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/79f2b3_789632a3717347b7910929976417d33f/1080p/mp4/file.mp4

After it has had plenty of time to rest, the sediment settles to the bottom, and is racked into bottles using a syphon. These bottles were then pasteurized to prevent the growth of any organisms, or the unlikely chance yeast might continue to ferment. This lengthens the shelf life of the wine and prevents a buildup of pressure that could cause bottles to explode. As a bonus, the pasteurizing process has a perceived aging effect on the wine because the heat changes the sugars’ chemical structure. This effectively makes a wine that may be only six months old taste as if it had been aged for years to decades.

To this day, Triple-Berry-Cherry Vikings Blood Mead remains my favorite recipe and I will be sure to make more in the future. It is true that you learn less from your successes than your mistakes but in this case, everything went right for me. I may change how I mix honey in large batches in order to reduce the amount of work that has to be done, but outside of that, nothing went wrong that I have to address in future versions. I drew upon 4 years of homebrewing experience to get this particular batch right, learning from many previous failures and mistakes. Even something as meticulous as science involves the art of experimentation. As I continue to perfect the craft I will inevitably draw upon this batch as a lesson for future experiments.