Caramel Apple Bochet - How to Make Mead

the long-awaited caramel apple boche so we've been planning this one for a couple of weeks and we've had some difficulties with various things like getting the right fermenter for this more on that in a little while but this is a caramel apple bouquet so it's going to be cooked honey it's going to have cooked apples in it it's also going to have apple juice some spices and of course honey so um what are we going to do first okay so we're going to start by beaucheing our honey and to do that we're using a crock pot because that's going to have a nice calm even temperature and hopefully we'll be able to avoid the problems we had with our original boucher okay so to make a boucher you have to beauche the honey which literally means to cook it now we've done this before and i'm a little bit gun-shy about doing it so what we've decided to do is we're going to use half and half and we're going to use a slow cooker so it's a little bit of a different method it's a lot more gentle so what we're going to do is measure out one pound of our honey into the slow cooker so to do that we're using our old scale which maxes out at 50 pounds because we're actually going to weigh it in this all right we're using our florida sweet squeeze wildflower honey now we're going to put that in the slow cooker on high and everything that i've read people say well you want it on high for about the first two to three hours and then they put it to low for the last couple what i'd like to do though is we're going to get a small sample of that and just touch it on a piece of paper like everybody does when they do a bouquet okay so once the beauche is going so to speak we want to start preparing our apples now there's some things in apples that you really don't want in your brew like the core and the seeds they do contain a very tiny amount of cyanide or it produces cyanide in your stomach it's more technical so we just want to eliminate them they also can add a little bit of a bitter flavor so we definitely don't want those in there we do however want to keep the skins because the skins as you know like any rind of fruit add tannins to your beverage and that's yummy so what i'm going to do is take the score and simply core the apples by the way if you're wondering why we're on opposite sides it's because we're you have entered bizarro world no i burned my hand yesterday and it's kind of painful yeah so she's not letting me do anything today i'm starting to think that there's a bit of a curse towards the caramel apple boucher and i don't know if it's just happiness and joy from the year 2020 or what but this is our third attempt at making this video and brian's hand is kept underneath the table because he's partially mummified um so i'm gonna be doing all the heavy heavy lifting today hahaha she's not letting me do anything no it's it's bad uh but we're making this video gosh darn it so what she's gonna do is just remove the cord from these apples and we're just gonna cut them into sections kind of like if you're making an apple pie if you don't have an apple corer like this what i usually do is i cut them in half and cut each of those in half and then i just kind of cut on the bias cutting that core right out of it no big deal there's one yeah so we're gonna do this and it might be fast forwarded so now we've got our apples cored it's time to cut them up and we want pieces that have a little chunk to them but not too big because if it's too small it'll burn in the oven versus too big it won't actually caramelize the sugars within it so you know what we're in a desperate situation yeah brian allows me to handle a knife i didn't have any say in the matter so basically we're quartering the apple and then having the quarters done okay now we need to face these so that they're all going to cook properly what i mean by that is we're just going to make sure that they're all laying like on their sides and not piled up on top of each other so that we can bake them in case you're wondering these are fuji apples why fuji apples because they're brian's favorite exactly i happen to really like fuji apples it's just a thing i find them nice and sweet they're an apple flavor that i actually appreciate them mixed with the apple juice will actually create a really nice apple flavor for this sizer it's actually a sizer not just a bouquet so this is just like all kinds of crazy names this particular meat if you watch our cooking channel and you got to see the applesauce video we use fuji apples in that as well now we're going to bake these in the oven at 350 degrees fahrenheit i'm not sure exactly how long because i want to see them shrink a little bit but i don't want them to burn so it's probably going to be 30 to 45 minutes but i'm going to keep an eye on them just to you know verify how they're doing now something i want to talk about just briefly is we've had some questions where people say oh i have this or i have this how much of this should i add to a mead the problem with questions like that is it's so open-ended there's so many ways that it can go and it doesn't even really depend on what yeast you're using it's really more personal preference what do you want it to be and then you can go from there we don't really like to make up recipes on the fly that way because it's kind of not fair to everybody else we may look like we're kind of haphazard fly by our pants kind of recipe makers and sometimes we are but normally and particularly in this case that is not the case at all and we're actually going to do a brew talk video where brian explains more about our process and how we come up with the ingredients and the amounts and the the process what we do to those ingredients and amounts um to make a recipe and i'm going to use this video this recipe as an example in that just to show you where it started and what it ended up becoming and then over time it'll actually get adjusted as we're making it too but there's ideas there's experience there's intent and then there's the outcome and there's math yeah okay so now all of our apples are on the tray i got the oven preheating at 350. i'm just gonna put these in there and um we're back so it's been about two hours on the beaucheng honey and everything that i read said you won't see much difference for up to four hours well not in our case i guess maybe our crockpot's a little hotter than most but i also read that fructose is the main sugar component of honey and that one starts to burn at 230 degrees fahrenheit i checked the temperature we were at 275. so there's definitely more of an acreage smell in the air now it's definitely cooked we stopped it it's got to be done at the two hour mark as you can see in the diagram it's showing very very dark okay so i don't want to go any further than that but what we want to do now is get it out of there and into the fermenter okay so it started bubbling slightly at the 15 minute mark and then at the one hour mark it was really active foaming and everything yeah something of note if you decide to do this make sure that the container you boil this in or cook this in is at least three to four times bigger than the volume of honey you're working with because it will foam up and foam over and this stuff is napalm it's just going to stick to you and burn so what we want to do now is add some water to this to cool it down and thin it up so that we can get it into a fermenter all right so you can see from this overhead view all the foam and crusty from the cooking of it and i'm going to pour some water in here but i'm going to do it very slowly because there's a chance that it could start bubbling vigorously it's foaming a little bit you can see on this side but it's not as not as bad as what we've seen before so now that we added the water we're just going to mix it up basically just to try to get everything off the side make sure nothing's stuck that sort of thing lowers the temperature nice and quick as well um since that was at about 275 a little bit ago now it's down to 130 already which that's almost pitching temperature 30 degrees hot but we're we're getting closer while she's mixing that up i want to talk about this this is something you guys haven't seen yet we were waiting for these to arrive so that we could make this brew because this is a 1.4 gallon container that way i can put in all the fruit and everything you can still see inside it and we still get a one gallon in the end these effectively replace our two gallon buckets i was never really truly happy with the buckets i don't like to use plastic buckets if possible and these have a wide mouth so it's perfect for a replacement for the wide mouth and their glass and their glass it also comes with a little rubber stopper so you can stick an airlock in there beautiful they do come with their own plastic airlock i don't even have one here because i probably threw them away already they're junk don't use it it actually has a hole in the bottom and a hole in the top and if i was a fruit fly i'd just fly in the bottom fly on the top and i'm in that brew it doesn't do anything that an airlock is supposed to do i don't understand everything else about this was designed so well why would they screw up that but i guess if you don't have an airlock at all it's better than literally nothing but i'm thinking potentially you're supposed to put a little bit of sanitizer liquid in the top little cat part but brian was so irritated with it that we're not going to bother we're just going to stick with what we know they actually came with little silicone bungs to fit air locks to so why not just do that but i'm pretty excited about these this is some reviews i read so that they were thin this is super heavy duty this is more heavy duty than most of the fermenters we work with no problem but what i really like is this we have another surprise fermenter coming it's a two gallon fermenter happens to be plastic but at least it's two gallon this is 1.4 so that means if i started something in 2 gallons and i had to rack it to something a little smaller i have a 1.4 if i started something in 1.4 or if i have something in a 1.4 and i need to rack it to something smaller i have a gallon then we have the wide mouth gallons a little smaller than that then i have a three liter bottle then i have a half gallon you see where i'm going with this right we have bottles and containers in various sizes on purpose to keep the head space to a minimum when we rack to secondary how's that looking it's looking like a looks like a mess cooked honey okay my estimate before of 130 was wrong that's 160 but it's okay because what i'd like to do now i think is we're going to start measuring the honey into this container and we'll add the apple juice we'll let that cool for just a little bit longer although i don't think it's going to cool much sitting in a black ceramic bowl so all right so while we're waiting for that to cool we're just going to measure out our pound of honey and again it's the same honey as before we're just going to get it into this fermenter okay so now that we have our one pound of honey in there we're going to add our apple juice this is a half gallon container of apple juice it's from aldi and the ingredients are apple juice from concentrate ascorbic acid vitamin c okay those things are perfectly fine to use they're basically there just to keep the color that's all it really is but we're just gonna put a half gallon in now fine you do it okay so um to mix this up we're going to need my spoon of unusual size okay we're gonna mix this up before we add the other honey in because this gives a nice large base of fluid to cool that down even more and then we'll take the temperature of that too okay now comes the dangerous part um this thing is probably oh it's not even that hot anymore if i can touch it with my bare hand it's actually not that hot i have very sensitive hands as evidenced yeah but this was 450 degrees okay so i'm going to stand up and chop my head up yep the idea is we want to get that into here without spilling it everywhere and now we mix again notice the color instantly dark dark brown but that's what we're going for here we have caramelized apples that you'll see those in a minute we have caramelized the honey adding those flavors in let me just take a temp 94. we're good this is this is totally safe at this point we want to be under 100 degrees when we pitch east i just really like that number you can go as high as 110 but beyond that you start having risk of damaging your yeast all right so our apples we baked these for close to an hour 350 degrees now i didn't preheat the oven so really it's probably about 45 minutes at a preheated 350. what i want to do though is we're going to put this bag right into that fermenter leaving it over the side and we're just going to put the apples right in there and you might think well shouldn't you mash them up they've been cooked through they're pretty soft so cooking and freezing both break up the cell walls making all the sugars available to the yeast got to remember these are microscopic creatures they're going to get in those little holes that we can't even see but this is why we wanted this fermenter for this job all those apples take up a lot of space i still wanted to get a full gallon out of this so in comes the 1.4 gallon by the way we let those apples cool to room temperature before we added them all right so we're only going to put the apples in the bag so i'm going to go ahead and tie this up and the reason only the apples are going to be in the bag is because that way we can remove them after a week or two just for safety's sake not that it's really that big of a problem but i like to get them out when we can the spices however being that we're using a minimal amount i'm gonna let them stay in a little bit longer until we rack the first time anyway can you tell she was a girl scout so today's spices are one cinnamon stick i'm just kind of poking it in there one whole clove and three allspice berries now the last time we did this in the methaglin people people were asking well couldn't you put those in secondary yes absolutely you can i am more of a set and forget it kind of guy i like to put things in the primary if possible now can that cause problems yes but again we're only using one cinnamon stick one clove three all spice berries i've done double that and not had a problem so we don't really have to worry about the antibiotic properties of those things in this particular brew it's so nutrient rich i don't think we're going to have much trouble i think we need a little bit more water we definitely do okay now at this point we can either add more water or more apple juice we're opting for water since this is already a pretty high gravity brew i would stop about there for now now what i want to do is just give this a little bit of a mix around and then we're going to take a reading on it and then we'll see if we need more water or not right now i'm pretty happy with the amount of head space we have if this thing decides to foam up like most things we've been doing lately do now we know our gravity reading isn't going to be a hundred percent accurate on the all the sugars that we have added in here because we know the sugars that are still in the apples still need to be extracted into the brew but we also know that a lot of those sugars in those apples because we cook them are non-fermentable just like in the bow shade honey and that's something that we want to talk about in the other video where we talk about how we planned it out but i'll just touch on it briefly i calculated that those apples have about .020 gravity worth of sugars in them it's hard to know how much we cooked out like how much of it became non-fermentable so if i go with say half right that means they add point zero one zero gravity to this must well we also have two pounds of honey in there well those two pounds of honey one of them got cooked so what if half the half of that is now non-fermentable sugar so you're just making a mess i know i don't do this see everybody thinks my job is so easy don't they anyway it is floating so you're good you don't need to worry about it okay if i were brian i would be freaking out right now because of this sticky yes we have a 1.118 reading right now i'm actually pretty okay with that we could add more honey but this is a nice starting gravity because it's not too high it's not too low we are going to be using welding 71 beast for this particular brew also known as lalvin 71b-1122 for those of you keeping track at home i know that that is a 14 yeast but it also goes higher on occasion when it has the proper amount of nutrition and proper conditions these are the perfect conditions for this one to explode so i figure you know this might go dry we can always just back sweeten and add more later not really a problem but i am going to pour this right back in and let derek go clean her hands okay so we have a couple other things that we want to add lately we've been using yeast hulls as a nutrient for our yeast and they worked so well that i actually want to continue using them our last brew that we used them in the hibiscus mead they actually worked a little too well right so we're not going to go for the full half a teaspoon instead we're going to do a fourth of a teaspoon right so that way we're using half the amount that way anything that might have been missed with the apples or anything like that is gonna get made up for with the yeast i think a quarter teaspoon is fine and last but not yeast i mean well it is yeast is our lalvin 71b now normally i would use half a packet for up to three gallons in a full packet for over three gallons but i'm starting to learn that there's a time and a place for everything and to me this brew has so many things going for it but it also has a lot of non-fermentable sugars that could hurt the yeast so i'm going to use a whole pack today i i was debating on this back and forth we are actually going to be doing a test on a one gallon to see should you use half a packet or a full packet because for years people have been telling me oh just use the whole thing and i always thought it was a little bit wasteful but if it really does improve the brew and its health along the way then that's a reason to do it if it just makes it go faster in the beginning i don't really care about that but if it actually improves the brew and the health of that brew now i'm all for it so let's just dump in that whole packet it's in front of the fermenter i can't see by the way i smelled this it literally smells like apple pie we're getting right oh yeah we're fine we're fine we were at 94 degrees before we put in the apples and now try to just kind of get everything submerged it's not really critical look at her she's trying to take it from my hand even now i'm left-handed so it's awkward to use my right hand for certain things by the way in case anyone was concerned about my hand it's fine it's just going to take a few days to heal it's it's still relatively raw and i'm taking medications to help with the pain and things like that but it'll be fine maybe a scar make me all manly i'll add it to the collection yeah add it to your collection the idea here is i i really want as much under the liquid as possible because if it's not in the liquid it's not adding to the liquid that simple and it has a potential possibility maybe it could mold or cause bacteria so we want to avoid that as much as possible so something about these is i really like this lid that they have it comes with a hole in the middle and there's a cap that's off screen right now that actually closes that up so you can use it as a closed vessel too which is great they're screw-on lids i can't see that that leaks it's got such a wide gap here with all the threads that's going to be a nice airtight seal it's also got a ceiling gasket inside that's a wonderful thing it comes with these teeny tiny little buns which i love i think that's great works with a regular style airlock so you're good now because this lid is plastic and it does have the foam uh cushion to help with the seal i wouldn't leave this in the sanitizer for an extended period of time i put the glass jar in first and then i just dunked this in there and then set it out i didn't want it to be soaking because i think that would damage the seal now the way we did this i'm going to end up with as much product as we possibly can get i might have been able to add more liquid to it we could have used apple juice but i wanted to see how this works out we've never used this fermenter before but taking that bag out when we do there's going to be juices in there and i'm thinking it's going to be somewhere in this level which is going to be close to three quarters to a gallon so that way when we rack off of the lease something like that we end up with as much product as we can about as much as if we had used a whole juice recipe in a regular one gallon container that's the intent we'll see what happens so from this point out all we're going to do to this is we're gonna give it the swirl so like that this is gonna sit for a couple of days and then we'll see if it starts up okay if it doesn't start up then we'll have to determine what to do then brian couldn't take it anymore we had to switch sides so here we are maybe 30 35 minutes into it and as you can see like that there is activity in that airlock already and that it's just further making me really want to do that test of yeast holes versus nothing and let me just show you what's going on here it's also making me want to test the full packet with versus the half packet i think those are two different tests though they are but we are going to test i think those are the two variables that we're seeing that may be affecting the speed of fermentation and this is what we like to do we come up with a theory and we work on that theory for a while when it's working and then you know we get an idea we try something different and go oh maybe we were wrong well i'm okay with being wrong as long as we correct that and do it the right way a lot of people have said i found a video from two and a half years ago where you were saying this and now you're saying something different which should i follow the latest one because that's how science works you come up with a theory and when that theory is proven false you come up with a new theory until that one's proven false too that's why yeah that's one of the exciting things about the whole city studying project is that we are sharing information not only what we're learning with you but what you learn back to us so that we can share that again and just build and get better and better anyway let me give you a look at this so now you're looking at that airlock and you can see bubbling happening quite clearly however when i look down inside the jar i actually don't see much of that bubbling action that would be causing this to start up like this so it's a little bit confusing i am seeing some movement on my side if you watch the oh i have more particles on my side than you do it's hard to see in this exact configuration so what's going to happen next well this is going to sit for probably a couple of weeks before we even take another reading on it but what you're going to see is the next step in this video where we've already done the readings racked it and bottled it so it'll be a little while a lot of people have been asking because we changed our system of how we do the videos so it probably will be a couple of months before you see the update but you'll see everything all at once if you like this video we have over 200 cider wine mead and beer videos on our channel thank you for liking and subscribing and as always thanks for watching guys have a great day bye you

Channel: City Steading Brews

Views: 55,678

Keywords: caramel apple bochet, apple bochet, how to make mead, apple bochet mead, caramel apple, caramel apple mead, honey wine mead

Id: vyR7-8i_bVU

Length: 25min 13sec (1513 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 28 2020