BernardSmith
Senior Member
I am posting this under "special Interest Wines" rather than meads because this mead is so.. um...peculiar that there may be few mead makers out there interested in this particular approach.
I make a batch of (hard) cheese from a gallon of fresh milk almost every week and this leaves me with about 7 pints of whey. Typically, I had been adding the whey to my compost or directly onto my vegetable beds (tomatoes love calcium) but it struck me that whey can be used as the base liquid for meads in place of water and the lactic acids formed when culturing the milk can add a hint (or more) of sourness to the mead in much the same way brewers work to sour some styles of beer (gose for example). So I am on a kick to make a number of meads in this way, the idea being that certain acidic fruits (mangoes, strawberries, berries and the like) may complement whey meads while other additions such as chocolate might be complemented in other ways.
Any other cheese makers on this forum who might be interested in making a few batches and in sharing notes? (I am a vegetarian so do not use animal rennet).
Two whey meads I have started are a mead to which I will add mangoes in the secondary, and a gruit mead (gruit refers to those herbs that brewers used to use to add to ales before hops became de rigueur in Europe) to which I am adding roasted cocoa nibs. But I certainly think that the third batch needs to be a braggot.
I make a batch of (hard) cheese from a gallon of fresh milk almost every week and this leaves me with about 7 pints of whey. Typically, I had been adding the whey to my compost or directly onto my vegetable beds (tomatoes love calcium) but it struck me that whey can be used as the base liquid for meads in place of water and the lactic acids formed when culturing the milk can add a hint (or more) of sourness to the mead in much the same way brewers work to sour some styles of beer (gose for example). So I am on a kick to make a number of meads in this way, the idea being that certain acidic fruits (mangoes, strawberries, berries and the like) may complement whey meads while other additions such as chocolate might be complemented in other ways.
Any other cheese makers on this forum who might be interested in making a few batches and in sharing notes? (I am a vegetarian so do not use animal rennet).
Two whey meads I have started are a mead to which I will add mangoes in the secondary, and a gruit mead (gruit refers to those herbs that brewers used to use to add to ales before hops became de rigueur in Europe) to which I am adding roasted cocoa nibs. But I certainly think that the third batch needs to be a braggot.
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