Recipe:
150 oz (volume) peaches
14 pounds orange blossom honey
2 inches of fresh ginger root
water (enough to top up to 5 gallons)
Process:
I started by blanching, peeling, pitting, and quartering the peaches. Unfortunately the peaches were not completely ripe (more on this later), so I ended up boiling a lot of them far more than a blanch. I then froze the peaches (I've read that fruit should be frozen before use to help break down the cell walls to release more of the ... fruity stuff).
The next day, I put the peaches into a big pot with enough water to cover them, grated the ginger into the pot, and turned the heat on high. Once the stew came to a good boil I turned off the heat. I poured the peach mixture and honey into the fermentor, added the honey, then topped it off to 5 gallons with water. While the fermentor sat in an ice bath (for about an hour), I stirred it like crazy, aerating as much as possible as well as completely mixing the honey in.
Once the temperature was down to about 80 degrees I pitched the yeast and sealed it up.
For the next 4 days, I opened the fermentor once a day to stir things up - partly to aerate (particularly the first couple of days) and partly to break up the blanket of peach scum on the top (rumor has it that the peaches can dry out and mold if left undisturbed for too long).
After a week of very active fermentation (I had to move it from the kitchen to the guest room because it was so loud that Jen was having trouble sleeping), I racked it to a 7 gallon glass carboy - if I had a smaller carboy I would have used it since I was left with only about 3 gallons of liquid. I kept a couple of quarts of the peach chunks and let that continue to ferment in the quart jars.
The story of the quart jars:
For the next week, I left the carboy alone, but monitored the two quart jars which continued to ferment (I loosened the lid a few times a day to release the built up CO2). Once the fermentation finally stopped (about 12 days after the initial boil), I strained the liquid and discarded the peach scum. This left me with one quart of very cloudy liquid which I left in the fridge for a couple of days and "racked" it to another quart jar.
This brings us to Labor Day. Emily was taking a nap and Jen and I decided to watch some Doll House (go Netflix/XBOX). I figured it was time to see how that mead was turning out, so I drank that quart. It was... interesting. It was pretty alcoholic and bitter. Mostly it tasted like unripe peaches soaked in vodka, and I couldn't taste the ginger at all. I was disheartened, but tipsy. My thinking was that the mead was pretty much a failure, so I did something that I would never have done to a brew I had high hopes for - I used my wine thief and stole another quart out of the fermentor.
The second quart was significantly better than the first. It was, if possible more alcoholic tasting (a surprise), but less bitter, and it finished with a nice gingery bite. It went down way too easily. I'm a little (ok, a LOT) fuzzy on the next couple of hours, but Jen drove us to Dairy Queen and I got a Blizzard. Yay.
The bottling:
Not much to tell here. The mead in the carboy was a pale burnt orange and smells faintly of peach. I filled 17 750 ml bottles (Belgian style beer bottles, actually) and corked them. I had considered adding some priming sugar to add carbonation, but at the last minute decided against it. Now it goes on the shelf where I can't get to it for a few months.
The numbers:
initial gravity: 1.1110 (at 82 degrees)
final gravity: ~.995 (also at 82 degrees)
Final thoughts:
- Next time I will use ripe peaches
- Next time I will make peach juice by boiling the peaches in water for a long time (we canned a ton of peaches in this type of juice this year, and now that I have done it, I don't see any benefit to clogging up the works with all that pulp - plus, it would be nice to end up with 5 gallons rather than 3).
