Pineapple Mead (Pineapple Honey Wine) How To

so we're finally gonna make pineapple mead took four years to get here but today we are making pineapple mead and not the same way that i made the one that i've been tasting all along this one's actually going to be made with real whole pineapple chunks that we have here they were frozen and they are now defrosted they've been sitting in that bowl for several hours there's some juice coming out and everything like that so they are good to go we're ready but beyond saying this is a pineapple mean there's a lot more going on and while we prepared sort of for this we also left some things up in the air because we wanted to go through the process with you guys and explain like why we choose this and why we choose this and how we come to those decisions not just well like oh we chose we're going to go with wildflower honey for this as an example and the reason is we had a quick what 30 second discussion and said well the orange blossom is probably a little bit strong and all the other flavored ones might get lost because the pineapples can be a fairly strong flavor wildflower is more neutral and it should only add a little bit of a floweriness but it won't add to the acidity note that comes from pineapple boom that's why we're going with wildflower honey very simple decision but it actually had a lot of ramifications to it so let's get started with the honey first and i'm going to use three pounds we are using a little big mouth bubbler because we have a big old pile of pineapple that's going to be going in this as well as some other things and i want to have that in a bag it's easily removable that sort of thing today we are using sweet squeeze honey that we'll have links to in the description below and this one's been sitting for a little while so it might be a little thicker because it's starting to crystallize just a touch which is no problem just you want to heat it up if that happens you can see some chunkage coming out honey doesn't really spoil so not really a problem just makes it a little thicker a little harder to work with three pounds by the way another advantage to the little big mouth bubbler is that wide mouth i can just pour stuff right in i don't have to worry about filling the funnel and cleaning out the funnel and all that kind of stuff later it's just so much easier now it does have a best before note on it which i've never seen on honey before so does salt and we're still within the time frame of the best before so we're all good all right so we have our honey now the first thing i want to do is get that mixed up a little bit so i'm going to take some water fill this about halfway and we'll start stirring that up and if you're wondering why i'm only filling it halfway it's for a couple of reasons one it's easier to stir and mix up when it's only halfway and two i have other stuff to go in here i don't know how much space that's going to take up so i don't want to you know take up all the space with water this is where you want to be a little bit sloppy you don't want to spill it all over the place but you want to get some air in there okay you want it you want it to aerate you should see the color lighten as you do that and what this does is it allows the yeast to use that oxygen in the very beginning phase of their colonization attempts so that they can go forth and multiply and once they've done that and use up all the oxygen then they get to making alcohol so the amount of yeast that you put in is a minuscule amount of the size that the colony will be once they've reproduced very important factor to remember many people still still ask us this they seem to believe that the amount of yeast you put in determines the amount of alcohol you make it actually does not um at all you can put in a very small amount of yeast and they'll multiply out to a very large amount of yeast and create the same amount of alcohol as if you put in a lot of yeast in the beginning so same concept there are different factors to that and that's a whole other video i'm not going to get into that now if you wanted to use one of those whip attachments on your drill now would be the time go for it i just you know i'll just do this entertainment value isn't this much more exciting than watching me use a drill okay for my next trick the next thing i'm going to put in is actually going to be the yeast nutrient and for this we're using fermento two grams mixed in a little bit of water just mixing it up to totally hydrate it and break it up and let it do its thing i'm just going to pour that right in now there's no harm in doing that because it's inert it's it's not a living thing so it doesn't really matter but water was a little on the warm side like maybe body temperature warm okay so like in the 90s or so for fahrenheit and i do that on purpose to help the loosen up the honey it helps mix it up it also gives the yeast a touch of head start a lot of companies suggest hydrating yeast which we haven't bothered doing in a long time it hasn't really made any difference but when they do suggest hydrating it they suggest hydrating in a warmer liquid than you might normally ferment in so it kind of does both things all at once for a long time people gave us a hard time because we didn't use bags for all of our fruits and various stuff so now we're starting to use bags more not only are we using a bag we're using a weight in our bag so that way it keeps the bag down we don't have to swirl it as often you should be able to drop that in there you don't want to drop it in there carefully place it in there it won't hit the bottom okay i was holding it up on purpose the bag the weight our hands all of the utensils that we're using have been sanitized in the red bucket of sanitization no jazz hands wow you know people are going to give us crap about that now right in goes the pineapple now this is like i said frozen pineapple previously frozen pineapple i don't know if i'd use canned there's other stuff added there corn syrup and things like that i don't i don't really like that concept so i don't know that i'd use that if you want to use a fresh pineapple i would cut it into chunks then i would freeze it anyway freezing does a couple of things it kills off some of the microbes they could go that make things go bad but it also breaks up the cell walls and allows things to uh once the defrost just kind of you saw the liquid that came out of there that's just within the fruit itself that's the cell walls breaking apart creating juice to that the most controversial meat ingredient ever i like them okay raisins they're good for you but they also add a little bit of a sweetness and kind of almost a smoky tanginess that without it pineapple might be a little bit bland now you can basically add any dried fruit that you wish to this rather than raisins if you don't particularly like raisins what you're looking for is dried fruit and you want to make sure that those dried fruit have not been treated with oil or any preservative yeah there's no sulfates in these sulfites or sulfates actually in these how much am i using probably about oh four tablespoons quarter cup or so not not a tremendous amount not enough to add a ton of flavor but it does add just like a little backbone that would be missing if it wasn't there now i'm going to seal up this bag [Music] okay the idea is to submerge it and keep it submerged so i want to kind of get that top part underneath it so it'll stay we are using a nut milk bag and it has a super fine mesh which is really cool but because the mesh is so fine it does tend to collect gases and kind of let it float so you want to kind of mush it down there so that way you burst its bubble and it stays submerged it ain't working so well but it's okay if you have parts of your bag that seem to want to float you just got to make sure that you keep everything moist that's all as i add more liquid i have a feeling this will do better so we have another decision to make and that is tannins we know that pineapple is gonna create more of a thin beverage if we don't do something about it in the past we've used a lot of tea to create tannins in our brews and there's nothing wrong with that it actually works really really well it's more or less a semi-predictable result but i thought you know we've been talking a lot about adding wood to stuff lately and aging it on oak and things like that we always say oh if we open this it would be better oh if we added oak to this it'd be even better if we hoped this would be better so why not just add some oak to it now maybe it won't be oak but it'll be wood i have this bag of wood from ken from barrel charwood products he whenever he has a new thing he sends me a sample of it and we just have a collection and he's probably laughing at me right now he's like i can't believe you kept all that but what i want to do is this is the process this is how we figure out what to do let me you know let's just push this out of the way a little bit and i'm just gonna okay we have cherry medium toast now this one's been used once already i think it was used in our initial uh beginner mead test then we have french oak medium plus toast this is an amazing one we may end up using it we also have amberana which is kind of like a cinnamony kind of thing that's a possibility but i don't know um let's see what else we got french oak medium plus toast sherry infused so this is like french oak and then some and then i have birch medium toast and we have white oak bourbon barrel char now derek asked me a question before we started she said what is rum generally aged in and it's actually aged in white oak american white oak bourbon barrels sugar maple medium toast now this was also used in our other one a lot of people ask how many times you can use these we don't really know once twice three times i don't know this is another heavy char smells really good the ones that aren't labeled i kind of just keep for our own uh hey let me experiment with this but we're only gonna use label european chestnut medium toast all right so this is my vote yeah i figured that they are in zip top bags though so what i want to do is just open it up and give a smell now this happens to be the white oak bourbon barrel chart this is derek's choice for this it has a really nice smell it's strong it's a strong smell so it's going to add to the flavor component this is the european chestnut medium toast that smells nice too though yeah i think they're all gonna smell nice honestly and this is what we do we go through and give it a smell and see this smells a lot this is the sugar maple smells a lot like the european chestnut i remember when we did the test of the sugar maple though it wasn't the smell yeah we liked better than the yeah the taste of it wasn't it wasn't nearly as strong you could probably put that one to the side birch i've never actually aged with birch here's the birch i don't know if i want to on this one because it's it's got a it's got a unique scent i don't know that it really goes with this french oak medium plus toast cherry infused i would i would say that or the white oak right off the bat yeah we know we like the french oak i don't know cherry see now the these that are used smell like that meat now so it's really difficult oh french oak medium plus toast that's your basic french oak and we have amberana the amberana smells like french toast like vanilla french french toast it's just it's amazing i don't think it's right for this i have narrowed it down to the white oak bourbon barrel and the french oak and i have the others and i'll just put everything away so here's the options the french oak medium plus toast is going to add a mild amount of flavor but a good amount of tannins the white oak bourbon barrel char is going to add tannins but it's also going to add a lot of flavor so it's a judgment call which way we want to go yeah we might for this first one do the french oak i'm thinking we can save the white oak bourbon barrel char for finishing something sure that wants that extra flavor for this one stick with something a little bit more on the neutral side um you might say we're playing it safe and yeah you're kind of right we're playing it safe because we don't want to overpower that pineapple this is just such a they're similar don't get me wrong they're actually quite similar just not as strong a flavor it's not as charred and it's not aged in bourbon so it's going to have a little more of a neutral effect so and it goes all right so now it's time for more water i think actually we can add the yeast now when i have these so i'm going to add the yeast now and then we'll we'll mix everything up later so this is another thing we discussed about prior to filming because we had options yeast is one of those things you can really alter the flavors and composition of any brew with a different kind of yeast we've been really liking the red star yeast lately and they have one that used to be known as montreshe it's now called premier classic it's about a 13 alcohol tolerance we've seen it go a little bit higher this i'm hoping for something around a 1.105 ish uh gravity reading therefore it comes out to around 13 even with the pineapple it'll be 13 13 and a half something like this is just right it's also known for keeping fruity flavors and things like that which is really important in this kind of brew pineapple from what i've seen and what i've heard can lose its flavor really quickly in a brew so we don't want to overpower and we don't want to lose it we want to do everything we can to keep it so here we go red star listen up putting it in plastic doesn't work i can't tear it i want to be able to tear the package i don't want to have to use my teeth and now i have to go all the way over there around the camera and get a pair of scissors to open this up should not need tools to open a packet of yeast how much am i going to use the whole thing why why not first we've had very very good luck using the entire package by the way what am i going to do now wreck your packet that's right there's a reason to do this and it's to get all the yeast out i mean there's there's yeast stuck in there so i thwack the packet a few times and they all come out and it's all it's all good now add some water this is why we pre-mixed because if i had honey sit in the bottom of this it would be very very hard to mix this at this point being that this is a larger than one gallon oh i'm not going to need it anymore i just wanted to say something because people tend to get a little crazy on us about how much water we use so i specifically filled this to 128 fluid ounces which is a gallon a gallon and we're down to just six uh eight eight so i used 120 fluid ounces so there's that answer so we should end up with a gallon of product the general answer is how much water do you need enough to fill it to the container you're using that that's pretty much what you want to do and you know allow for spillage like what i just did i do want to just mix this around a little bit before i take a reading and yes we are aware that it is important because it will change the dilution rate and so your abv your initial gravity reading is going to be slightly different but more than likely it's going to be slightly different based on what type of honey you're using because you're not going to be using the exact honey that we used what your environment is so many other factors the calibration of your scale yeah there's a million factors that can affect it that's why we like to give an original gravity reading rather than a true volumetric measurement yeah that made sense because that way it's more accurate you can shoot for that gravity very easily like you could say okay if i'm making a i have a gallon and a half pitcher okay i'm gonna use that to make my my brew well i know that they started with a 1.100 i put in the amount of honey that they said and i only got a 1.080 gravity okay add more honey till it gets to 1.100. now you have relatively the same brew we did whereas if you just stuck with well that's how much honey they used it wouldn't be the same makes sense now i know that wood's going to float i'm aware of that and it's something that i'm just going to have to deal with like by finding it and jamming it down the side i did not put it in the bag because i want to be able to remove that just in case i have a feeling no it's gonna be a pain i could put a like a lead sinker on it and tie it down or something but i have a feeling it's going to come out before the bag does so i wanted to make sure i had that option of removing it sooner rather than later but now it's mixed up let's get a reading find out what that gravity is now this reading is going to be approximate because the pineapples have not released all their sugars so we have to take that into consideration speaking of sugars in the pineapple let me just talk about that for a minute people are always asking how do you calculate for that let me just give you an example we use two whole pounds of frozen pineapple in here okay i just looked that up using google foo and found out that there's about 45 grams of sugar in one pound of pineapple so that means there's 90 in two pounds that equates to .009 gravity nine points of gravity in the whole brew potentially from the pineapple once you ferment that out that is literally like one percent 1.2 to 1.3 percent abv potentially coming from the pineapple it's not anything to get overly worried about now if you add six seven eight pounds of fruit well that's a whole different thing but you have other things to worry about like where are you fitting honey in there but that just gives you an idea of how we come up with those things pineapple is not known for having a ton of sugars berries are another one they don't have a lot of sugars when you get into like bananas and things like that they tend to have a lot of a lot of sugar stuff so we'll just grab a reading here so our hydrometer reading on this is giving us 1.09 1.090 okay so that means 1.090 plus the nine points 1.099 which my target was 1.100 so i'm off by one point on my target gravity not too bad i'll take it i'm pouring that back in because all of this was sanitized it's all clean there's no issue in doing that many people throw that away or drink it it's really sweet not sure i'd want to drink it so we want to put our lid on crank it down very very important with these little big mouth bubblers crank it down harder than you think when you think you're done wait a minute and try again because it probably has another extra half a turn to go otherwise it might not be down far enough to clamp the seal there's a very thin layer of foam in the top of this lid and that is what creates the seal so you want to smoosh that by cranking it down yeah some people take like four or five of those seals together and they make a thicker seal that way so that that works too all right so our airlock is filled with sanitization liquid at the midway mark that is indicated on our airlock um a very important aspect of brewing that i don't have in front of me right now but i'm going to make as soon as we finish this video is note taking what do i put on my notes the name of the brew the date i started it all of the ingredients i usually leave off the yeast for whatever reason i don't know why so i end up watching our video again to find out what yeast i used and the original starting gravity these are all really important things to have for repeatability and consistency and that way you know when your brew is done when it's safe when it's ready to go all those sorts of things but this is now what are we gonna do with it we're gonna let it sit for a few hours a few days whatever it takes until that starts showing some activity if we don't see activity in the first few days i'm going to start looking for evidence inside the fermenter because maybe we didn't get a good enough seal but if i see bubbles coming up the side i know it's working and it's all good we'll be back to show you once it started up all right so here we are about 18 hours in maybe and as you can see we have a pretty active fermentation a little overactive maybe and uh here we go there's my note it's just kind of ruined and this is why we say to put it on a cookie sheet with a lip that's how much leaked out so sadly there's a little bit of wastage here because there was too much in the fermenter and it took off a lot more than i ever thought this one would but um hey it started up the yeast are happy we're gonna have pineapple mead so yay all right so it's been 13 days and looking at the airlock which yes there is probably a little bit of must mixed into that star sand or into that whiskey at this point probably because this thing exploded but i do want to get a reading on this we have not checked it since we started it we have not done anything to it it's been sitting on a shelf i did give it a couple of swirls the first few days and that's about it i don't get too into that so much anymore mostly because of where we keep them is a little bit less convenient if you go this way you will avoid the bag what i'm trying to do is avoid the bag like she says um and we are just going to take a gravity reading on this which simply means use the sampling method of your choice turkey baster works just fine the syringe and tubing we seem to like and i'm going to put that into a graduated cylinder with hydrometer so we can just take a specific gravity reading to find out where it's at okay so we started at a 1.090 and i said at about nine points so 1.099 with the fruit that we added in there and this looks to have gone wow it's at 0.998 so let me write that down so that's 0.998 that puts it just a little bit below 1.000 it's a pretty safe bet this is done but you know what we're going to do due diligence and we're going to let this go for one more week and then take another reading and if they're the same then we move forward it's also starting to clear ever so slightly but we also have other things to add to this so i want to make sure it's totally done before we move forward i'm just pouring it in very carefully i'm actually pouring it right onto the bag that's still floating up over the top here also it's a good idea at this time to take the lid off because you get to see what's going on and you get to stick your face in there and spoilers not gonna tell you what we're experiencing yeah i'm not gonna say word okay so i'm gonna put the lid back on crank this sucker back down and now i want to give it a little bit of a swirl i haven't done this in a few days and the reason i'm doing it now is twofold one to get some of those fermentation gases out now this actually smells quite nice you could probably tell because i do not have a poker face but i want to get those gases out and let the yeast have a chance just in case there's anything left that they want to get at as you can tell the airlock is going active so we know gases are coming out of there the second part of this is i want to make sure that the bag the wood that's floating in there everything is wet because if it goes dry bad things can happen mold bad bad bad things so what about mold in fermentation once the fermentation process is really going and if everything is a perfect scenario you've got a good seal you've got an airlock on there everything is go it becomes an anaerobic environment and that means there's no more oxygen in there and that's one of the things that mold needs to survive so sure things happen and you don't have the perfect environment and it can still occur but more than likely it's going to be more challenging for those molds to actually grow it's pretty hard to mess up a brew in all honesty once it gets going it's pretty hard to mess it up i always like to say brews want to make themself we just need to get out of the way and that is really the truth once we lay the groundwork and get it going just sit back let it do its thing it'll be just fine there's only a few things you need to do that can help things along like what i'm doing right now remember if you ever have a question along the way of your brewing process please ask us in the comment section below and we will get back to you as soon as possible and do that before you dump your brew yeah definitely so uh what are we gonna do with this now we're gonna let it sit about another week see you then okay it's time for the second reading we're feeling pretty hopeful as you can tell by the fact that we have the bowl and the colander ready along with more pineapple bits they've been defrosting for a while it was 0.998 i mean you know we're pretty sure it's done okay when you remove the lid the first thing you want to do is a visual inspection looks pretty good yeah i don't see anything untoward what i'm looking for is things floating in there things with hair blue black green moldy looking things tentacles yeah and i mean if something's moving around that's probably a really bad thing too i'm also checking for smells yeah there's no bad smell with this one wow how old is this we cheated because we put the this is 20 days old it smells good it really does wow yeah we cheated the oak is going to stay in this too i'm not taking that out really yeah well we're going to take a taste we'll do a preliminary taste i think i want to leave them just but i am going to take the bag out now remember this has pineapple chunks and raisins that's what's basically in the bag i'm just going to let it drain a little bit we all know this is my least favorite part i'm not squeezing the bag we do more than one video in a day and this is like the third one that i've had to do this with the first one i totally squeezed the bag the second one i got halfway this one no not doing it we have a colander inside a bowl right here for this very reason yeah but you know whatever now i'm gonna go wash my hands okay so now that we did that i'm gonna take a reading oh yeah 0.998 on the nose it's exactly where we want it to be so i'm just going to pour a little bit of this off i'm going to take a little sample taste because i'm pretty sure we want to add more fruit but does it need anything else who knows do we want to leave the oak in longer i think we're going to like this one so it's a larger larger initial pour see when you do a dedicated smell it's a little younger smelling than it was before yep it smelled much richer go ahead and taste keep in mind this is like 13 alcohol and only like three weeks old that's not bad it needs more tannins though so we're going to leave the wood in it it's nice and rounded but i think it does need a little bit more three weeks just isn't enough sometimes needs more i also want more pineapple flavor definitely without a doubt more pineapple so can you put that glass over there i can put this glass over here thank you so a couple things we got to do we have this vessel hidden down here on the bench because we're going to rack this now we know we're keeping the wood so we're putting the wood in there we know we're keeping that sample so i'm going to put that sample in here i'm just going to pour it really carefully some people throw this away i'm not some people and to those people i say why waste it i mean you could drink it you know but it'll be so much better in a few weeks why would you drink it now for our normal racking procedure we put our destination vessel which is this lower than our source vessel which is this and we need our auto safety all right as always with an auto siphon you have the this piece then you have the tubing the tubing goes into the destination this goes into the primary fermenter whatever you want to call it the source i go halfway down to get it started so i don't disturb too much of the leaves and we get it going and then drop it and just walk away we have a dedicated video to our racking process and i will link that in the description below all right it's wrapped we got a bag we gotta wait we got more fruit let's put all that together so i'm going to put the weight in the bag first and then i'm going to put the bag in here because this juice yeah it's frozen and it's got juice coming out and we don't want juice on our table we want it in our fermentation vessel because that's just good this is mostly thawed well okay it's not even remotely thought it's still ice chunks which if this was a fermentation like if we were still looking to ferment this that might not be such a good thing but because this is done i'm not worried about it now will this restart fermentation maybe it it has a chance except that we're very close to the tolerance of our yeast so it might for a little while it might extract some sugars from this making this a little bit sweeter so we'll check a gravity next time around as long as i remember and that way we'll know if it extracted sweetness or if it actually fermented more i need to wash my hands do you want to tie this up before you wash your hands i want to walk i want to tie this up before i wash my might get cookie it's a new now the weight is so that this doesn't float because we want this to go to the bottom it's probably going to stick out of the liquid a little bit and before somebody freaks out about head space um yes there's more head space here than we normally would like once i get my hand out of there actually it's not that bad never mind now the bag was sanitized the weight was sanitized brian was sanitized the bag has air in it too so he is using his sanitized hand to push that bag down and try to get those air bubbles out so that way it'll limit any floating and they're not coming out all right now i gotta go wash my hands it's like asmr or something well so many people have given us a hard time about talking while the fermenter was open yeah people have done that and i mean there's there's some truth to it okay i'll give them that but in reality the likelihood of you infecting your brew by breathing or talking over it in the little bit that we do it's really not very likely i'm sure it's possible but it's really not very likely um anyway i wanna get this dry so that i can put my note back on and then what are we gonna do with this i'm gonna let it sit since there's fruit in there the fruit is partially frozen still so it's gonna take like 24 hours to defrost um but it'll probably go another couple of weeks because i want to extract all that fruit and i want to see will this start fermenting again because if it does that's okay it'll just have a little bit more alcohol and we'll worry about it at that point that's kind of the way we like to brew is i have a rough idea of what we're gonna make and we say all right well we did two pounds in in primary and then we just put two more pounds that's how much we use by the way two pounds of pineapple in conditioning if it re-ferments all right well we need to adjust sweetness even more will we add honey this time we're not really sure we did use premier classic yeast which is a 13 yeast and we're in that 13 range for alcohol so maybe we're past the tolerance and maybe it'll just extract the flavors in the sugars and make this pineappley mead more pineappley find out soon and we're back with pineapple mead now this has been sitting on the second round of pineapple chunks in a bag and we noticed it actually re-fermented a little bit there was activity there was some foam there's even a little bit of croissant formed so yeah i waited till it pretty much was neutral and the airlock again which i know is not the end-all be-all but it is a good indication that something might be finished i do however want to get the bag of fruit out of there get the wood out of there so i'm literally just going to grab them and take them out so i did squeeze the bag just a little bit and there's going to be a little bit more that comes out what we do and somebody asked us i guess we didn't show it last time was we did dump that back in at the end um i guess it wasn't on video but yeah yeah sometimes it's very minimal comes out so it's just a precautionary thing it's it's not really necessary i guess you know what it smells like it smells like pineapple it smells like pineapple so what i want to do is take a reading on this and get our final gravity which is really not a final gravity because this is going to be like a supplemental final gravity so let's get the hydrometer and test tube in let's see how it goes they might be wondering why am i taking a reading if we already knew that it went dry it's because i added more fruit and like i said it actually re-fermented a little bit so i want to make sure that it's done and 0.994 it's lower than it was before which is crazy but let me let me take a note so essentially we kind of step fed this i could add up the sugars that are in the pineapple which we know from earlier it was about 9.009 gravity so that would be like 1.2 percent more abv something like that which is pretty cool and i will actually put the full calculation of that eventually don't don't leave it'll it'll come up but uh 0.994 you know what let's um let's take a quick taste of this it's not super clear but we also did just mess it all up with the bag so i'm not going to hold that against it can you hand me that for mentally that's part of why we do multiple rackings and we're going to let it sit so it'll clear out it was actually getting fairly clear so that's that's pretty cool because this seems pretty young and full of itself i'll do the first smell and taste it does smell like pineapple it smells a little sweeter than the old pineapple meat that i had less rich though like it doesn't have the cooked pineapple flavor or smell i would actually like to calculate out that abv for you though so here's how we're going to do that very very simple i'm going to whip out the calculator the teachers told me i would never have within arm's reach that was sitting right here i keep doing that joke but i just think it's hysterical because i was told that for years okay so we started with 1.090 and we now know that the sugars were about nine points so i'm going to add those .009 so that gives us a 1.099 starting gravity that went down to 0.998 minus 0.998 gives us 0.101 now at the end here i added 9 points to that so that means that 998 plus 9 would have been .007 and then it went down to 994. so that's another 13 points so plus 0.013 gives us 0.114 or 114 points of gravity were spent and i know half of you are going huh but that's the way it works i have a write up of it and everything like that times 135 gives us 15.39 abv we use premier classic which is a 13 yeast further proof that yeast can't read but what we also did is this is sort of a step feed if you really want to think about it it was already at like a 12 percent or something like that the yeast were already primed they were still active we gave them a little bit more sugars with a lot of nutrient because it was whole fruit let them go just a little bit further so i'm going to mark this as 15.4 percent pretty respectable and yeah you can taste the alcohol that's about the only note that i'll give you right now but there'll be a tasting we may end up back sweetening this i'm not sure yet the oaking i might want to oak this more i'm not sure but not yet for now we're going to let this clear out before we uh go any further so we're just going to stick uh oh we need to rack this yes we're racking yeah we're racking it now don't mind me all right so we reacted what's racking it's from moving from one vessel to another we actually have videos on that if you don't know what that is but that's the gist and if you look minimal headspace that's actually about perfect though a little bit more wouldn't really make much difference airlock and bung back on it and what are we going to do with it now i'm going to let it sit actually i'm going to put a label on it and then we're going to let it sit probably until it clears might be a week might be two weeks this one was starting to clear already so i think we just disturbed all the leaves and it just it just needs time to clear out again so we'll see you when that happens all right so when we last left this it was at 0.994 and it was wrecked so we're just going to take the airlock off and we're going to rack it again we're just going to rack it to our picture so that way we know exactly what our volume is because of our fancy favorite picture and then we're going to go straight to bottling but there's also a very good reason why we're putting it into the picture because we're going to do a quick preliminary taste actually it's not even a preliminary this is like our finalization tasting just to make sure that this is the way we want it to be because what it is now is what it's going to be of course aside from aging i think we can take the cap off this time the cap is important it is not just for protection anymore okay the idea is this can go all the way to the bottom of the fermenter without the cap so if there's any leaves in the bottom it's going to get sucked up there's a very very fine amount so i i'm taking a little bit of a risk here you know what i thought better of it changed his mind yeah i'm allowed but there's just a tiny amount there and i really don't want that in our bottles so yeah probably better off with the cap it's been racked we have 130 ounces which is 3850 milliliters so it's a little bit more than a full gallon and that's okay because we're going to take this quick preliminary taste i will say this it's kind of nice and clear it actually cleared up quite nicely now this is very dry 0.994 now that's dry according to the numbers does that mean the taste is going to be like that i would like some sweetness on this it's a little astringent and that's the pineapple i think it needs some not a lot yeah it's reminding me of what our original pineapple tasted originally because that one went dry too go figure yeah i think it needs a little bit of sweetness so we'll get ready and add some honey so we're in a bit of a quandary here we know we want to back sweeten it because we want more of the sweetness to come through we don't know how to convey this information properly to you because based on what your beverage spinal gravity is will be dependent on how much more honey you may or may not want to add also your personal taste of what is sweet and what isn't sweet is going to change that amount as well we get asked all the time how much should i back sweeten well that depends on so many factors like derek just said so what we're gonna do is we have here some of bevy's honey that is just a little bit left in the jar and i'm gonna put some in now we have it on a scale so i know how much is going in there okay but that's not really the important thing the important thing is going to be the specific gravity reading that i'll take at the end but the way we do it is we just add some just gonna do like a quarter pound which is four ounces there we go four ounces okay so i added four ounces of honey so i'm going to take that off the scale and give it a mix this is where you want to be a little bit careful because this is where you can oxygenate okay so you want to be careful i'm not stirring it so wildly that it splashes everywhere and that sort of thing i'm just mixing it okay now one caveat to doing this is this ended at 15.4 percent and it used premier classic yeast which is a 13 yeast you might be tempted to say oh it's fine you're past the yeast tolerance it won't re-ferment but are you we don't know that because this was at .994 so it's possible it could re-ferment so we are going to pasteurize this just to play it safe okay that is properly mixed so i'm just going to pour a little bit into the glass here i don't think it did a whole lot he needs more go with another quarter pound so it's a double quarter pounder so yeah another quarter pound so we'll be putting in eight ounces or half pound or 227 grams in total while i'm doing this i know someone will ask how do i know how much to put in some of that comes from experience personal taste and just having done this hundreds of times to know how much to do it's somewhat guesswork but it's kind of an educated guess because i thought maybe a quarter pound would be enough to bring that up you know to a little bit over 1.000 so it would have just a touch of sweetness it didn't really do much at all so adding half a pound should add about 17 points in total bring this to like a 1.010 or so gravity which is on the lightly sweet side should be a nice level of sweetness should be detectable is the idea we don't want to make this uber sweet if you wanted to you could certainly add more of course now i'm at the end of the jar so i only have a 3.9 yeah i have a tenth of an ounce to go and it's taking forever there we he's about to have to change cards in the camera for filming here this is also a nice way to see just how accurate your honey is for points because it should be like 17 and a half points okay which i don't think we can really measure 17 and a half points but it should bring it to about 1.010 give or take a point or two now some will also argue that because we added volume we diluted the abv and they're not wrong okay in fact this is now it went from that 3850 to about 4 000 milliliters or you know something like 132 ounces okay is that some four ounces over 128 yeah maybe less than one percent difference and i don't mean one percentage point of abv i mean one percent of the total that it was so that means out of 15.4 percent it might be literally like a couple of percentage points of the percentage of abv so it might be like 15.3 instead of 15.4 is basically what i'm getting at it's not anything really to worry about if you have a friend that when you hand it to them says oh this should have been 15.4 and it's 15.3 and they turn their nose up get better friends those of you that had that happen know what i'm talking about i'm guessing though this is going to be about as sweet as i really want it to get oh i think that's good it's not overly sweet but now i get a little bit more of the honey and the pineapple is nicely balanced we'll talk about that more when we do the official tasting but for now let's get this in a bottle all right so the reading is if i had to really get specific 1.011 so it's one point different than what it should have been which 17 and a half would be 1.0105 so yeah it's it's there one point zero one one that's what we're calling it as this is ready to be bottled but that 1.011 is just to give you a reference for the sweetness level that we ended up at your tastes may like it sweeter or drier but this gives you an idea and it shows you how the math works you know adding that half pound actually raised it the amount that it was supposed to what do you know so this is going to go back into here very carefully all right so it's time to bottle and i don't know if you can hear it at all but it is really really raining hard outside just in the last five minutes this started up so i apologize if you hear any off in the background but the way we bottle is we use an auto siphon and we use a bottling wand what's a bottling wand it's just a rod with a springy thingy in the end also called various types of valves some people call it a shorter valve some people call it stem valve i'm calling it a springy thing and what it does is when you push down it allows the liquid to flow when you lift up it stops it so that way when you put this into a bottle you can fill it or not fill it depending on what your need is like when you're changing bottles you obviously want it to stop otherwise your meat is on the floor not in a bottle and that's never a good thing so we have removed our cap because we know that we are sediment free because we've already wrapped this so to the bottom it goes derrick is holding it in the bottle you want to make sure you push it down if you've watched our videos before and you've heard this all before i apologize but you know what there's always somebody that this is their first time so that's why we say that all right so we ended up with three 750s full one one liter this is actually a one liter not a 750 and then a mostly full 750 ml what are we gonna do with these i'm gonna drink them all right now i don't think so one of them probably one of these three is going to go away for a whole year we might even put it away for two years so that means one year and two year maybe that's something we're starting potentially things that we like or we might like or might need improvement or might just be better in two years we're gonna start doing that and since we have another need that we made with pineapple years ago that's going on four years now in two years that'll be six years old so a six year versus a two-year read that just sounds like a video in the making to me and then of course this one that is half full we're gonna drink this one in just the next couple of minutes okay before we get to the tasting something i want to go over again is if you decide to back sweeten like we did you want to make sure that it will not continue fermenting for us that means pasteurization there are other methods if you decide to go that route make sure to follow the manufacturer's directions very carefully because you can well you know make less than favorable results okay pasteurization seems to work really really well for us it doesn't take that long we use a sous-vide makes it nice and simple we have a video on that link in the description below i will say this it's got a nice color it really does and i'm happy with the clarity too when you look up through the glass you can see a little bit of a haze it's like looking diagonal down through it looks like it doesn't yeah it looks so clear quite clear this sat for a few weeks um this was actually started oh this is um this is like six weeks old at this point so it's it's pretty young still by most any standard it is 15.4 percent so that's you know kind of on the upper end of what we like for me technically speaking it's a sac mead how crazy is that above 15 makes it a sack mead curious i don't know that i'd really like to call this a sac beef this is this is still a normal normal so besides the clarity the color is really quite pretty it's a it's a darker golden rod golden rod i like that word that's what it is golden rice that's going to be our descriptor for this mead yeah on the aroma i'm getting the cooked pineapple cooked pineapple a little bit of wood yeah and i detect just a touch of a floral like from the honey yeah oh yeah the smell is actually quite nice yeah okay i have to admit along the way i smelled like the bitterness of pineapple like you know pineapple can sometimes be astringent sure that's what i was getting and i wasn't really thrilled but i didn't want to say anything because you know it was preliminary tastings and stuff this is the real thing now so if i feel it now i'm saying it i like the smell but i'm getting a lot of pineapple it really has pineapple upside down cake yes on it that yep all right that's nice it's not overly sweet but it has a sweetness yes i i'm trying to mentally compare it to four years ago now i'm thinking when we first made the pineapple mean and i remember when we first made it we were like oh what do we do wow it wasn't very pleasant well let's let's do this though uh oh here we go the old dusty bottle four years plus gonna pour a little bit of this one i'll tell you what that's got some nice color too look at that difference in color that is really quite interesting because we know we out this one yeah this one this one is the newer one this is our newest pineapple mead that we made with actual pineapple this one was made with pineapple juice now that could be why yeah the pineapple juice could have been pasteurized at the factory where it was packaged which would cook it which would darken the color that's that's true that's it that's a good that's right that's my story i'm sticking to it i am going to refill my glass ever so slightly though now so before we get into the comparison let's let's stick with what we we have going on here oh okay um besides my memories of how different the original version was this one up front i'm getting the sweetness very first and then it and then it transitions rather quickly into the almost citrusy aspect of pineapple yeah a little bit yep and that was the astringency i was talking about yeah yeah and with a little bit of sweetness it makes it better and then at the end i'm getting some of the bitterness of fermented honey which is a common thing that we we get brian tends to get it more than i do but i think the pineapple is bringing that out more and i'm attributing that mostly to its youth at this point let me take you on a little trip so as it enters i immediately get a faint sweet flower and then the citrusy thing comes through then as it starts to travel the pineapple is recognizable it wasn't recognizable as pineapple before but now it's definitely pineapple and a touch of honey like if you just took a couple drops of honey and put it on a piece of pineapple that's kind of what it comes through as but it's a cooked pineapple kind of like the pineapple you pull off the ham it's not fresh in other words it's it's not coming across as fresh and then on the finish like she said it has a slight astringency i do get that honey bitterness in the back of my throat not unpleasant just that is a thing that happens with mead with me dereka gets it too the finish is actually quite long it stays with you like as i'm breathing i'm tasting it like feeling it as i'm breathing out sounds really weird but you know what i mean if you know what i mean i attribute that actually to the higher abv on this it very well could be i don't taste alcohol though no it's more of the the the pineapple astringency that i i'm but what i mean my brain is 15 plus percent i don't really taste alcohol yeah it doesn't taste like ethanol like sometimes they can be very harsh yeah i think this is going to age beautifully yes a year or two and this is going to be super smooth and wonderful and that's when we segue into the original pineapple mead because we did notice that as it aged it just got better and better there is no comparison on the smell this is nothing like it at all oh wow it is cooked cooked it's almost a bouquet cooked that's nuts it is completely different okay so wait a minute before we go into this too much let's just give this a score okay all right because that could that can skew the score now remember our scoring system goes one through ten one being absolute crap we probably wouldn't serve it to our worst enemy and we might even dump it down the drain ten means this is awesome this is like the best thing i've made this is the best thing i have in my collection however you want to see it keep in mind we have gone to 11 ours does go to 11. and we've only done that we've gone over 10 twice i think two different two different brewers have gone over 10 but 10 is pretty much the high water mark if you will the other ones were kind of just memes it's kind of like the drew carey show whose line is it anyway we make up the points and they just don't matter um i have a number i kind of do all right one two three six point five wow i expected her to like this more than me so i knew i was comfortable at seven because i'm enjoying this but let's hear from brian to see why he went lower i don't hate it but here's the thing pineapple for me as much as i like pineapple has to be very sweet and that's my issue i don't want to make this overly sweet because then it just gets sickly sweet but by not making it more sweet the pineapple comes across as a little bit astringent i hate to use this word but i get a grapefruit type thing from it and i just hate grapefruit i just cannot stand it the flavor the taste everything about it bothers me which is weird cause i like oranges i even like lemons a little and i like our rank per lime but grapefruit oh my god why would anyone want to eat that on purpose just doesn't make sense to me so whenever i detect that it turns me off that said i can get past it because there's just enough sweetness to get there just enough pineapple flavor to offset it a little bit but it is kind of there so it i'm hoping that ages out i feel like oaking this up front did this a world of good so much because even though we're going to get to the comparison of that in a second even though there's differences here and they're now coming more forward as we're experimenting with these things i still think putting oh yeah the wood in in primary which is something i would have never thought to have done before actually helped us a lot yeah it gave a lot more mouth feel this has a very rich thick viscous mouth feel that would not have happened had we not oaked it now we could oak it at this point forward and it'll probably come out much the same okay but this is it was easier honestly so let's let's get to it i am going to give my impression here light floral almost a white wine mixed with pineapple on the new one deep rich heady boucher caramel not even the same ballpark like if this if we said that this is pineapple upside down cake i don't know what that is then because that is pineapple upside down cake that is the glaze on the bottom like the charred part this would be like the top part that just barely got any cooking done to it they're so you would never think they were both pineapple this is more floral and fresh where this is more cooked almost burnt yeah and it's really interesting because i never would have thought that there would have been such a difference and many viewers have asked us you should do a comparison between brewing with juice versus brewing with fruit and using the same fruit like fruit juice and fruit solids and i'm like yeah it's just going to be the same thing right this is telling me no not at all i'm going to reserve my opinion until she takes a taste can i say it now can i say it can i say it can i say it the new one is so much better oh my god it is so much better the older one is watery and thin it has a little bit of almost a burnt flavor it doesn't have the tannic aspect that you want it doesn't have a good mouth feel i remember liking this one better but i've been drinking so much of this yeah i don't even have to take a sip of this now what's scary is this has been improving for four years yeah so imagine how crappy this was when we first made it this is the difference that several years of experience can make when i first made this i really didn't know much about making mead wow and yeah now we can sculpt a brew much better than we could back then i i would i would go on a limb and say if you intend on fermenting something with pineapple just use fresh pineapple don't use pineapple juice i say i won't do that to that no no i had to it's a thing it changed the color but i'm wondering if it's if it's not only just oh see now that's actually kind of nice using the pineapple juice but oaking it up front it might have been the combination of having fresh pineapple oaked up front this is so much brighter in flavor and stronger in flavor all the favorable flavors whereas the other one has a lot of darker more sullen notes it's the easiest way to describe it mixing them improved it but you know because you put a good one with a not so good one it's going to get better right it's got like a sour note to it that i'm not getting not vinegary though no no no no not vinegar there's definitely a little bit of a sourness and i think it's more dry too this i know the old one was very dry it came out totally dry yeah this one we sweetened have we not sweetened it they might be more similar but the taste the taste though the flavor profiles are so completely different i'm shocking i'm really enjoying the floral note in here i want to think that there is a slight hint of vanilla which would which would be appropriate since we oaked it those tend to give a slight vanilla vanilla yep yep and i think i think that's helping it as it swells it's smoothing out the vanilla has a tendency to make things just go smoother it rounds off those sharp corners which pineapple has some rough corners that's the thing it's a little more acidic it's got a lot going going on so yeah it needs that yes and i think that worked out well uh i have to be honest with you i'm completely shocked at the difference between the two beverages i thought they were gonna taste a lot more similar i do not want to drink the old pineapple mead anymore yeah compared to this no i don't just i don't want to drink it maybe there won't be a six year tasting of that one maybe we'll just continue with this one let this one become the new the new pineapple meat every year yeah i don't i think that's that's it for that right we don't have any other bottles oh we do then if that's the case maybe we might cook with it i wouldn't be opposed to oaking it oh okay now okay yeah all right um maybe we'll do a video on that even yeah yeah we'll have to pour it out of the bottles and do it safely so that we don't oxidize but uh i'm sure we could figure out a way to do that it's probably better than leaving it sitting around for 10 more years and not wanting to drink it so you know we'll go with that even though i only gave it a 6.5 i think it's going to improve so much in a year that it'll be much much higher next year when you guys see it again but uh as always guys thanks so much for watching and have a great day bye

Channel: City Steading Brews

Views: 59,139

Keywords: pineapple mead, pineapple honey wine, pineapple melomel, honey wine, pineapple mead tasting, pineapple mead city steading, honey wine recipe, home brewing, home brew alcoholic, pineapple mead recipe 1 gallon, pineapple mead recipe, pineapple honey, pineapple melomel recipe

Id: tcrKMHBUELk

Length: 61min 22sec (3682 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 19 2022