Making a Pyment Port - How to Make Fortified Mead

no this isn't a tasting video we're gonna make mead [Music] [Applause] [Music] all right we're gonna be making a pie mint pork why because a million people have asked me to make a port here's the problem i can't make a port because i'm not in portugal that's the only way you can actually make a port it's kind of like champagne that way there's a rule that says you can't do it however i can make a port-like product and because we're not making a real port i'm going to make a meat port which is going to be a pine port because we're using grape got all that now what's in these glasses this stuff right here the fanciest brandy that i can get for less than 50 bucks a total wine and more why are we drinking brandy brian because what is pork port is a fortified wine so in our case our pine port's going to be a fortified mead and i'm going to fortify it with this port is traditionally fortified with a spirit made from grapes so we are going to be using brandy this particular one has like all these amazing notes to it it's got some spiciness it's got a dry fruit like a raisiny kind of flavor i'll drink this all on its own i really like this okay i'm more of a whiskey guy but this is nice so in adding this to a mead we said all right well if we just add this to a straight-up grape wine mead it's not really all that great so we came up with a few other ingredients to add to make our piment port we're going to need three quarts of concord grape juice now i'm using concord grape juice because a this is nudsen's brand it's easy to get it's not super cheap but it's a really high quality i mean here's the ingredients juice from ripe whole organic concord grapes period that's it there's nothing else now if yours has ascorbic acid or anything like that it's fine what you're trying to avoid is the sulfites and sorbates things like that those are preservatives they can inhibit fermentation we're also going to be using honey now i'm using orange blossom honey this happens to be the sweet squeeze stuff we'll have links to this in the description i'm going to be using 1.75 pounds of that honey today because i have a very specific number of gravity that i'm trying to get to so i want to use just a specific amount going over the real basics here we're also going to be using some brandy now this is a 40 alcohol i'm going to be using a 4 to 1 ratio for every 4 parts of bead i'm going to use one part of brandy more on that later on different video actually it'll be the second part in addition to that i'm going to be using the peel of a mandarin orange i love mandarin oranges they are not exactly orange but they're they have a little bit of orange essence to them and they're very fruity and the peel is incredible for aromatics so i think it's going to add this wonderful flavor profile to this then because we're using concord grapes and they tend to be very sweet i need something that cuts that so a little bit of tartness something that adds a little bit more body and tan in two things so also we're looking for a floral note and it's really difficult to get that tart almost citrusy essence with a floral note unless you use hibiscus i used a whole ounce of hot dried hibiscus leaves and a cup and a half of water or so to make this tea it is deep red it smells incredible and i think that mixed with the orange peel mixed with the honey mixed with the concord grape is going to make a really spectacular wine all on its own so that's like recipe a but we did ask you guys what to add and hibiscus was up there orange peel was up there there was also allspice berries where's the allspice berries well guess what they're going to be added in conditioning face because they can be a little bit of an antibiotic and they might hinder fermentation so we are not taking any chances with this but to get the fermentation started we are also going to be using lalvin k1v1116 yeast why am i using that yeast you might ask well because it's got a relatively high alcohol tolerance and it's known for bringing out fruity flavors which we have a fruity flavor a fruity flavor and a fruity flavor plus some fruity flavor i want to bring all those flavors together therefore lalvin k1v it is and to keep the yeast happy we have some fermaid oh i'm using two grams today because i actually read that uh you're supposed to add a little bit more after a couple days i'm not bothering with all that scheduling and all that kind of stuff i like to add it in the front so i'm just going to use two grams and i think that'll become my new standard so long as it works i did dilute it in a little bit of water because it's so much easier to get it into the solution that way anyway let's get started so we have our one gallon fermenter we have our stainless steel funnel and we have our scale all these things well except for the scale have been sanitized in the red background [Music] which is right there look at that as i said 1.75 pounds of honey now if you want to figure out your gravities honey adds .035 points of specific gravity per pound in a gallon of must this is a one gallon batch if you want to make a five gallon batch you do everything times five if you want to make a three gallon batch you do everything times three if you want to make a 20 gallon batch you might want to wait till the end of the series to make sure that this comes out good first so 1.75 pounds of honey weighing it in i teared out my scale while i wait for the rest of the honey to come out i'm gonna peel this orange i'm just using a regular old peeler trying to get just the skin rather than the uh the pith if you will these guys are the cuties though from publix that you could basically just like peel it and i'm probably just going to do that yeah they're super easy to peel and they really don't have a very thick pith layer so and i'm breaking the skin into little pieces on purpose so that it's you know pieces inside the brew rather than a big chunk of peel and we have a lovely plate of orange peel and i know because somebody's going to ask so what are you going to do with the orange now you peeled it i'm going to eat it okay so we have our honey in here but it's kind of filled up the funnel and it's kind of nasty in there so my hibiscus tea now this is still warm but not hot and it steeped for 10 minutes if anybody really needed to know i like to do that for hibiscus longer than that gets a little bit more bitter not enough time and it doesn't really fully get in there so i like to do 10 minutes i'm just pouring around the edge of the funnel to get rid of any of that excess honey got most of it yeah we still have all the grape juice to add anyway so oh yeah it's going to get in there next i have fermaid o now this is the nutrient if you really don't want to use nutrients you probably can get away with not using it for this it's not going to be that high of a gravity and there's other things in here that will act as a nutrient so you'll probably be fine i'm doing this just as a precaution just to be on the safe side and you know it's a natural thing so i'm okay with it fermento is the organic version it contains nitrogen and other nutrients necessary for the yeast to consume honey and i just mixed it with a little bit of water pour it in there we go now the juice now when you buy juices like this you want to shake them really good before you open them because a lot of the times stuff will settle on the bottom and that stuff is good stuff for your yeast so you want that in your brew and any sediment like that is going to resettle out during the fermentation process and you will rack it away and have a clear brew but you'll have a happy east in the meantime at this point though there's honey in here that i need to mix up so i'm going to get my thumb saver bung oh it's over here we got this for christmas this is little yeast plushie it's our mascot i just haven't come up with a name yet oh if anybody has a good name for the yeast mascot of city studying leave it below in the comments i'm really curious i i want to actually hold a contest to see what name gets gets named yeah what we name it or something so i like to use a solid bong put it in there and i'm going to shake the jesus out of this now when i say that what i mean by bejesus is i don't know i just started saying it years ago and i keep doing it i just mean shake the heck out of it you can see down here that we have a bunch of the honey stuck to the bottom and we want that to be unified throughout the solution and that's why we shake it also we shake it so that we can oxygenate our brew oxygen is an important ingredient at the beginning of fermentation stage so that way your yeast can be fruitful and multiply to eat up all those sugars but do they do this i can't i can't do it with that hand they do it like this i broke that finger they well they don't live long but they do prosper their colony may live long they go dormant they don't die well we're gonna we're well we may not we're killing them actually no they go dormant they go dormant fortification they go dormant oh yeah by the way in case you're curious fortification like we said earlier really just means to add a spirit to a wine or a mead or a brew and what it does is it basically overpowers the yeast goes beyond their tolerance for alcohol they just say nope i'm done and that's it it stops fermenting dansk mod actually uses fortification a lot in their means that way they can keep it more natural without having to use preservatives they don't have to pasteurize either because they have fortified it is a way to do it to me you are going to be diluting the flavor of the mead a bit so it's not something i want to do all the time but it does have its uses that looks relatively mixed yeah time for the next grape juice addition gotta shake the bottle get all that good stuff so at this point too i'm going to put in the orange peel and i'm literally just sticking them through there i mean you know it doesn't have to be super precise here they'll they'll come back out later don't you worry before brian peeled that orange i made sure to scrub it really well with a vegetable brush that we use only for our vegetables so that way if there was any oddities on the exterior that got cleaned away uh you could sanitize it if you really were totally paranoid we weren't as long as i scrubbed it well so yeah some people will run it through like they'll dip it in star sand or something and you can totally do that if you really want to um to me the tiny little bit that might have passed through the scrubbing the alcohol is going to kill it off so not really all that concerned number three okay i'm going to pour this one more carefully because we're starting to build up some foam and i don't really want to have foam issues speaking of foam we've had some foam issues where we see this huge head of phone build up from the shaking process the aeration process and thank you all for all of your input i've received dozens upon dozens hundreds dare i say thousands of suggestions on how to eliminate foam some of them quite good some of them i'm not so sure that i'd want to do that to my meat but i do appreciate you guys giving me feedback and input because it's actually really really cool that's one of the things that i like about this is getting to read the comments and write back to you guys i try to get back as much as i can it's getting a little harder um i hate to say it but with the channel getting a little bit bigger it gets a little bit more difficult to keep up um with 400 and something videos out there now and somebody can comment on any one of those and we see them all i'm also stalling just a little bit so that maybe some of that foam goes away but uh yeah we do really appreciate the input so keep them coming um as far as how to really eliminate it though the best way is time there's really no other way to get rid of it than time however at this point for the sake of time i'm going to add my yeast well we still need to shake it again i can shake it once the yeast is in there and i gotta take a reading too right but there's always been some talk about oh what if you take a reading after you add the yeast or before you have these does it matter if you take it right away it really doesn't matter at all the yeast is not gonna change that reading and it hasn't started making alcohol yet so it's not really a factor at all i'm putting it in now because i don't want to have to make room later i don't want it to get stuck on the sides by the way this is a lalvin product which means look at that i can open it with just my hands i don't need to get a pair of scissors anything like that and i am using a whole packet of yeast it's kind of the way we do things now we found it to be kind of superior in almost every way yes it is a little bit wasteful some people will say it's wasteful um to me it guarantees a clean fermentation it guarantees a good startup and it's worked really really well for us so i'm doing it if you find yourself in a situation that you need to be slightly more fuegol frugal than that then go ahead and use one full teaspoon of yeast per one us gallon or half a pocket either way by the way flax your packet it's important it's my psa for the day i was also hoping that by dropping the yeast and it might break up some of the foam so there was there was multiple reasons for doing the yeast the way i did thwack your packet needs to become a t-shirt all right it has come up multiple times i've heard this multiple times i'm saying it on camera now so that you great thanks all right let's see if i can pour some more juice in there i was hoping to get all three quarts in there that doesn't go in there hoping to break up some of the foam just a little bit because right now i'm not even past the shoulder yet this is going to be way too high of a gravity at this moment so i want to be able to uh add some more of that juice in there i know i just made a big deal about all the suggestions that everybody gave me and right off the top of my head i can't think of one right now so i'm just going to do this some of them were actually really good others involved removing the foam which worries me a little bit some of them were a little bit risky uh people said using brushes and things like that stuck in there i'm a little bit afraid of that so be careful in how you decide to remove the foam personally i think the natural method just letting it sit is probably the best way but we're making a video here i don't have time to let this sit ain't nobody got time for that that's old now isn't it i think so it's okay it's still funny it will never not be funny i'm going to risk [Music] okay just for the sake of time i'm going to take a reading now and see what we're at because there is a possibility that it'll be a little bit too high but when the phone goes down i can add more later so we might just do it that way so let's take a reading now when i say take a reading i mean a hydrometer reading to get the specific gravity of our must which that's what this is now it's a must it's you know a must right so what we have is a 1.114 original gravity which is pretty respectable it's not as high as i was afraid it might be from having not enough liquid in here so that's kind of a good thing i believe my projected gravity was 1.100 so i'm only 14 points above that not really a problem i'm going to go with it what that means is put this back in give it a couple more quick little shakes to make sure everything is completely dissolved in there or as close as i can get it and then we're going to put an air lock and a bung on it so we put an air lock and a bung there's a couple kinds of airlocks on the market i like the s-type it's just my personal preference the three-piece the other ones that are more round they are easier to clean i will give you that we put sanitizer fluid in here not actual sanitizer not the star stain itself but sanitizer fluid once it's been mixed okay the same stuff we've been cleaning everything in you can use you know vodka liquor whatever you want don't use plain water bugs and things can still get through that and live that's not what you want don't use isopropyl alcohol either oh yeah don't do that that's toxic you don't want to put anything in here that you can't actually drink now i don't want to go drinking a glass of starch and fluid but it's probably not going to kill me where a glass of isopropyl alcohol will so you know one of those little things um anyway if your bung doesn't stay in like this one is getting a little bit loose we'll just stick a rubber band on there later but the really important thing that i want to get across now is label let me find a writing implement i know i had one around here somewhere there it is the chaos that is our kitchen when we're brewing so this is our piment port today is january 14 2022. we added almost three quarts 2.75 quarts of grape juice 1.75 pounds orange blossom honey we added um one ounce dry hibiscus tea i had to say dry because you can use fresh hibiscus too so it's made a tea made from the dry leaves that's the important thing peel of one mandarin orange two grams of fermento and k1v116 yeast i don't know where they get these names i think because they're all laboratory created it's probably that version but is there a k1v115 quite possibly and one one one seven like is 117 better than 116. are they holding out on us anyway from there no holds barred i'm masking tape this comes on and off and gets removed and gets reused don't worry about it labels you know should be easy to read and that's about it and from here this is going to sit for a while while it starts up once it starts up we'll be back to show you what it looks like forgot one thing on my note 1.114 starting gravity very important start the pen too so it's been a couple hours we have activity in that airlock already as you can see it's not super active yet but it's definitely doing something and if i look i don't really see anything inside yet but let's uh let's take a little bit of a closer look shall we so you can clearly see that the airlock is moving and so are my hands as i try to hold the camera sorry oh come on you can do it i just said i just talked you up you could do it you can do it there it is okay and as we get down inside there's that foam now that's from earlier it's starting to break up a little bit when we get down inside though not a whole lot i mean i see a little bit of activity right in there at the top of the surface line there so you know it's it's starting up it's uh it's getting there so get down inside it's very dark it's very hard to see so we're just gonna leave it at that it started up and how long do you think this will take two weeks three weeks something like that 1.114 not a super high gravity but not super low either gives uh somewhere in the you know what i have a calculator right here 0.114 times 135 that would be about 15.4 if this goes dry so it's pretty reasonable i'm gonna give this probably two three weeks and we'll be back with another reading in the next part of this video as always guys thanks so much for watching and have a great day bye [Music] port is traditionally fortified with a grape port is traditionally fortified port is traditional [Laughter] [Music]

Channel: City Steading Brews

Views: 21,179

Keywords: fortified mead, how to make fortified mead, fortify mead, pyment port, port mead, pyment mead, grape mead, add brandy to mead, brandy in mead, distilled mead, mead recipe, mead making, port wine, home made mead, how to brew mead, how to make mead, make mead at home, mead recipe for beginners, mead recipe ideas, home made wine, port wine mead, mead like port

Id: 66o7LH6ZjZg

Length: 20min 54sec (1254 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 20 2022