Why Can't We MAKE a HYDROMEL? Strawbery Banana Mead Recipe

someone said hey can you make a strawberry banana meat and I said I'll do one better we'll make a strawberry banana hydromel if you don't know what a hydromel is hydromel is a lower ABV meat it's some people call it a session meat usually it's carbonated but it doesn't have to be there's a lot of variations and let's not get caught up in names let's just go with it's a strawberry banana lower ABV meant be served cold sparkling beverage oh so this is going to be carbonated we are carbonated oh yeah we're car this one too all right you okay carbonate everything carbonate all the things but anyway so we have our scale handy and I have fixed our scale for those of you who've been watching for a long time this exact scale the my way Baker scale there is a way to turn off the auto off function so it won't time out so you can sit there and pour one drop of Honey at a time all day if you really want to and it's never going to go off you will drain your batteries though so you want to be careful with that all right so being that this is a hydral we don't need quite as much honey as we would typically would in a traditional style meat normally we like to use anywhere from 2 to 3 lb sometimes a little more than 3 lbs of honey for this I want to keep the ABV under 10% so I'm going with 1.5 lbs of honey I could go higher I could go a little bit lower so we got to switch our mode you want it to be on pounds pounds ounces or just pounds just straight pounds we want 1.5 pounds5 all right I can put the grams right here when I edit the video but I don't know it off the top of my head I'm sorry it's like 780 something I think 787 I don't I don't know I'll put it here so pound and a half you ready ready you're supposed to watch the top oh why is a sharp person watch top she watches the top so it doesn't overflow I watch the bottom so that we get the right number it's kind of terrifying sometimes because we've overflowed it that's how we know to do [Music] that all right you're at the bend at the low side oh I'm at the bend okay we're at 1.33 lb sounds [Applause] [Music] [Applause] too okay so a little bit about the honey while the rest of it drains out of the funnel by the way everything got teared out so all the honey that's in there has actually been weighed and measured and not found wanting it needs to all get into the Container but the honey we are using today is Kirkland Wildflower honey um we've actually started using this recently a lot because Honey's been harder to get so some of our normal suppliers don't have have it so we've been using something that should be easily available for most of our audience we like to use things that are easily available for most of our audience okay that's important so we may not use the most exotic ingredients all the time but we do use things that you can get we're also aware that our audience is international so if you don't have availability to a Kirkland Wildflower honey then any Wildflower honey Regional to you local to you it's going to be pretty close be just fine every region has its own Honeys and varietal and they're going to taste a little bit different um but this is going to be a flavored me so the exact type of Honey isn't as crucial I'm not saying it won't make a difference but it's not as important as if we were making like a straight traditional then yeah it's that's what your flavor is coming from whereas this the banana and the strawberry should should should add a lot of flavor to this so we'll find out from there but anyway and for some bizar reason you have no wildf flower honey available to you whatsoever clover honey will be just fine actually you could even use orange blossom for this because the citrusy little bit combined with strawberry actually would probably be beneficial too that would have been my second choice really okay so what I want to do is add some water to this so I have 112 fluid ounces here of water measured out and what kind of water is this this is our filtered hun or filtered water we have over here a berky filtration system system which is really awesome because it's not electric it's it's just a natural flow double container filter system you can basically collect rain water yeah with it it's just awesome yeah the test that they have to make sure that everything is set up is you actually put food dye in it to see if any of the color comes through it doesn't come through pretty crazy it's it's impressive they're not cheap but they last forever like we should get what 5 to 10 years on these filters yeah so to me it's worthwhile um for us being in Florida it's actually really important because they always say oh collect a bunch of water before a storm well ours is six gallons so we got six gallons of drinkable water right there and if you put some in the containers you can have even more but uh we'll have a link to that in the description if you're interested we find it to be possibly the best solution for filtering um there are plenty of ways we used to do the RO uh reverse osmosis and it just became less than convenient for us so that's why we did away with that but as far as water selection for your particular Brew goes you want to make sure that you can avoid chlorine if at all possible if your tap water is heavily chlorinated you can pour it into vessel just let it sit out overnight because chlorine is a gas and most of it will come out ex except that most areas don't actually use chlorine anymore somebody told me this they use chloramine I looked into it and they're right chloramine actually doesn't evaporate out so you can't really do that anymore if that's the case go to the go to your local grocery store and buy some drinking water y okay I am getting ready I started already I put in the uh thumb saver bung which is just a bung that doesn't have a hole in it I'm going to shake the beesus up by the way if anybody gets offended by my use of the word be Jesus it's got no connotation to anything other than it's just a funny word that's exactly how I see it if you see it as something else I am sorry but that is not the intent just say it I might have to edit that out now when we shake it notice I only fill it halfway there's a good reason I want to be able to shake it up for first because when you have that much space it shakes much easier and second I want to get some of that air jammed in there you see it already it's changing color and why do we want air we want air because the beginning of a fermentation our yeast as we're using dry yeast needs to rehydrate get build up and create a colony and by that I mean they're reproducing now yeasts don't need to get together to reproduce they actually reproduce all on their onesies mitosis but they do oxygen in order to complete that process actually it's budding isn't it I don't know what the technical word I thought it was cellular mitosis but it could be budding somebody else tell me so yeah beginning oxygen good once alcohol present Oxygen Bad this looks pretty well mixed I have a general rule of thumb for mixing when you think you've gone enough go two more minutes it's hard to over mix I don't think you can except when your arms fall off then you've over mixed so goat just just to the point where your arms are about to fall off and then stop all right anyway so this is a pretty simple recipe and by simple I mean like it's really really simple so what we're going to do is get our funnel back do you want to put your mixture in before you I'm going to pour it into that you're going to pour your mixture into this into the funnel right that's that's that's yes we're saying the same thing we do this all the time we say the same thing just different ways yep so what I have here the mixture as she called it this is fade o this is yeast nutrient and I have five grams of it in a little bit of water just like maybe 2 ounces I let it sit for a while because it tends to be clumping and it's clumped up still I can't break it up it just it does this thing okay it bothers me it will eventually break down but I got five grams and just a little bit of water here I know that's higher than the manufacturer suggested but we've learned from some of our viewers that more f o really isn't a bad thing um it really doesn't add a weird flavor it's good for the yeast what now you had talked about adding your yeast to that yeah have you decided not to I decided not to okay um we have come to the conclusion that it's not necessary to uh preh hydrate that's the word we don't need to hydrate our yeast I was going to just throw the yeast into here and then dump the whole thing in there because it helps it to keep from getting on the side but I'm not sure that it really does so today I'm going to keep it simple and I'm just going to pour this right in can I have the water please out I was going to pour but then I'm like you probably need to pour cuz control yeah and then I'm just going to fill it the rest of the way with water we did pre-measure the amount of water might but we put in the 2 ounces that was in here so I'm not sure that I'm going to use all the water that she had in there by the way the amount of water that we figured out is to a full gallon and literally all I did was I know that three pounds of honey takes up 32 fluid ounces of space so one and a half pounds of honey should be 16 so 128 - 16 is 112 simple but I got foam look at that it's right down to that last 2 ounces all right well it's all right I'm going to do it I'm I'm getting it in there you still got to get the yeast in I know I'm working on it okay I'm not putting that last bit in that's it give up okay that foam that's in there is just air bobbles it's nothing to worry about but we are going to add our yeast now do you want to I want to take that mix it and then take a reading before adding the yeast yes we might sound like we're all kinds of discombobulated today it's because maybe to a point we are but this is a very basic recipe so it's like I'm skipping ahead not meaning to so basically we're just creating our musts today I know what you're saying there's no strawberries or bananas not yet they're coming you got to keep watching for what we're going to do now is take a reading go ahead go I didn't want it to drop and I'm aiming for something like 1.05 zish because we get about 35 points we get 1.035 for one pound of honey in a gallon so that means the next half would add 17 more so 35 45 about 1.52 is pretty much where we should end up which like I say will give us somewhere in the neighborhood of like 7 to 8% ABV when it's all fermented out it's about good 1.52 just like just as expected funny how when you measure things right they work out had I put that last little bit of water in there it have been less so I'm going to dump this in actually you know what hold that I'm holding this yep we're going to be using Premier cot de Blanc yeast by red star and of course this is one that I have to cut it because it's not it's a terrible non- terrible packet I know it's okay people think I'm actually offended I'm really not it's just a joke I just do that um but I do actually prefer a tearable packet something that I can tear open um these are coated with foil and I know they're supposed to be better and all that sort of thing I I get it um but I just like to make the joke anyway so I'm going to use about a half of this because this is a lower ABV we don't need the whole thing and we have a good amount of yeast nutrient in there so I'm just going to eyeball half one packet does up to about five gallons so you know a little more a little less is totally okay that looks pretty good and I was saving that as like a swisher to uh understand to clean it out in case I messed up which I really didn't this time by the way everything here has been sanitized in the red bucket of sanation now what I mean by that is it is literally a big red Bucket over there filled with sanitizer fluid our sanitizer fluid of choice is star sand you want to sanitize everything now don't get ins about it you don't have to go totally nuts you don't have to like sanitize the cat and the cupboards and the ceiling and the carpet and the bottom of your foot and you know don't get crazy about it but do the best you can this these towels that we use on the table only get used for Brewing so they are in and out of sanitizer fluid all the time they get washed separately from everything else the chances of infection from the towel is slim to none you contrary to what some people like to think then we have all of our equipment that's all kept separately it gets cleaned separately it gets sanitized so it's important to stay as clean and sanitized as you can but you don't have to obsess over it and one very very important thing sanitizing is not a guarantee of no infection but also not sanitizing is not a guarantee of infection because I've had a few people recently say oh I forgot to sanitize this one piece of equipment should I dump out my Brew well no Let It Ride find out what happened I mean probably going to be okay infection is just that it means was there a microbe present at the time that you didn't sanitize that thing that's it that's how it turns out okay so don't get crazy just do the best you can but anyway I'm missing something yeah was waiting for you to pause so I could go get it okay so now we are at the stage where put an air lock on it my yeast is still just sitting on top of the foam so I just want to kind of work it around here hold this for a second wiggle it just a little bit yep she said it it'll get in there I just like to make sure because sitting on that foam for a while who knows you know maybe they won't be as happy I don't know all right probably going to need a rubber band on this one I think this is just a little bit too big some of these fermentors are from apple juice some are actual M so they're slightly different in size and I can't really tell the difference cuz they all have threads and they're all very similar so yeah anyway so what are we going to do with this now we're going to let it sit but we're going to let it sit on a tray because we did get a little kind of foamy up here and if the yeast starts getting really happy it'll create more foam on top of that foam and perhaps push out the airlock and create a big mess so if you put it on a cookie sheet that has edges to catch any overflow then be in your tray rather than all over your kitchen also if it gets way too happy and I end up having to clean out this airlock more than say twice in the next day I'm just going to remove the air lock and put what's called a blowoff tube we actually have videos on that but it is just a section of tubing going into like a mason jar filled with sanitizer fluid but in the meantime this is going to go sit on the tray and then go into our fermentation station and we'll see you when fermentation is complete it has been 28 days exactly 4 weeks don't ask me why it's been four weeks it's just been 4 weeks okay it's probably been ready for a little while longer that than that but look at this it's Crystal Clear but we do have this beautiful moonscape that I need to show you look at that I am so excited about these things and I nerd out about this a nice compact yeast cake with a beautiful texture and I thought that just has to be some weirdness of mine but no one of our VIPs Jared lowjack actually shares this fasination of what I term the moonscape so there you go Jared isn't that thing of beauty I think they're both just a little bit nuts but that's just me anyway so it is beautifully crystal clear and we do have a nice Lee cake on the bottom there so I'm going to take the airlock off and we're going to take its first reading cuz we haven't taken a reading on this yet we did have a 1.52 original gravity because it's a hydrel it's not meant to be super high so uh see where it's at I have a feeling it went dry just a thought and we're amending some of our rules we have the the one week rule take two readings my personal feeling on on it is if it's something that we're going to carbonate uh this is an exception because this one's going to get this one's going to get weird I'll but more on that later but if it's something we're going to carbonate I would probably just take one reading and if it's 1.00 or below that move forward because waiting is only going to harm your chances of carbonation that's one of the theories that we have so we're working off of that right now uh because the yeast go dormant they get racked out blah blah blah all that kind of stuff can happen blah blah blah that's my thing okay so there's a lot of effervescence here there's a lot of bubbles it's very gassy however it's also a 0 n92 is dry I have to admit I kind of feel bad that we're continuing with this beverage because that Clarity is something to behold it is beautifully clear here let me see if I can give you a better idea of the Clarity let me hold that up to the light look at that I mean that can you see that yeah I mean I'm I'm trying to keep it on the same plane as our faces so well if you put something behind it like you can totally see it's it's there there's my hand behind I mean look at that that's amazing anyway enough about the clarity so what we're going to do is we're going to put it in a little big mouth bubbler and you might be wondering don't you usually worry about head space well we we did say this is a strawberry banana hydrel right and we don't have any strawberry nor banana yet yet being the operative word there so what we're going to do is rack to this first actually no we're not because that would be dumb we're going to do something else first we have here D strawberry D yeah yeah go ahead D sliced strawberries and bananas which is perfect for smoothies or in our case perfect for your mouse it actually happened to be 5 8 oz bags so it's 2 and2 lb of banana and strawberry so it's a mix but it's okay it's a Frozen mix so that was why we chose it because we knew regardless of where you were in the world if you could find frozen strawberry and bananas you can make this me and it's still frozen which is a good thing can you move this over here I can't please thank you you're welcome all right still frozen but that doesn't really matter you we could have let it thaw a little but Frozen they don't leak out all over the place and make a big mess and make a big mess but don't worry that it's frozen cuz I have plants oh yeah I have plans but it's going to take me a little while to do this so we'll be back okay so now we have all that frozen fruit in there I happen to know it's going to add some pectin especially when I pasteurize it it's going to definitely create more of the pectin and more Haze so we're going to add some pectic enzyme and because it's already been fermented I'm going to use double so I'm going to use one whole teaspoon of pectic enzyme and I'm putting it in right on top of this fruit so that as we put the hydromel on top of it it mixes it through it'll also help break down that fruit just a little bit more can you add that to our notes please and now we're going to Rack this right onto that Fruit by the way the reason why I said it was stupid to do it the other way is because what if we have more hydromel than room yeah would have been bad I couldn't put all the fruit in I'd rather have all the fruit in and we'll drink some of the hydrel if there's too much you know benefits of being a brewer we got too much going on here okay um you know what because this is going to get racked again I I don't know I'm undecided it's one heck of a Le cake down there I I think I'll leave the cap on it's judgement call just go halfway down and get it started we started we're started all right just seemed to take a while we had someone recently who purchased an auto siphon and they said it was a cheapy one from eBay after a while but they were having problems where it would not work straight out of the box so be careful on the auto siphons that you buy the ones that we get the firm Tech ones have been great we've never had a problem with any of our Auto siphons and some of the we've had for you know a couple of years and they're not expensive but they do a really really great job so when we put a link to something it's not just a oh yeah let's make a couple pennies by selling this thing it's nope we used it we think it's good it worked really well for us that's why we put a link to it so that it can help someone else too one of the things you want to take in consideration with your autocon in particular it's gaskets what makes it work are rubber and they're are soft rubber so if you keep it in your sanitization liquid be on the 2minute recommendation you may start to degrade those gaskets and that's going to cause you problems so just keep an eye on that I had a series of bubbles right here and my OCD was bothered so that's what you saw me doing just then let me get close to the bottom I like to tip it like this with a good solid Lee cake like this where it fell out really nice um you don't have to worry about it and I can probably get almost all this liquid out as long as we have space for it okay so we did have a little bit of loss but if you look at this that is like peanut butter okay I don't really want to drink that I know some people get really offended when I say things like that and they will run it through a coffee filter they will filter and all kinds of stuff to me that's just a couple of ounces it's not enough to worry about but if you want to go and Salvage that you certainly can um I don't really have a good way to do it CU I've never really bothered with it but next what are we going to do with this we are going to put a lid on it and an airlock because what's going to happen now is we're going to pasteurize this the whole thing okay let me explain why if we didn't here's what would happen that fruit is going to ferment and we're going to get more alcohol and it's going to create more CO2 but it's going to deplete the freshness of that fruit that we really want so my concept is we're going to pasteurize this completely then that also sanitizes the fruit makes everything safe and healthy and all kinds of you know people don't get mad at us for not sanitizing stuff and then after that we'll set it up for carbonation but that's later on in the video just keep watching and we'll show you how we're going to do it the pasteurization method we actually have videos on that and we're going to be using a sous or an emersion circulator and what I do is I get the internal temperature up to 140° and hold it there for 20 minutes now in this case that means the fruit and everything has to get up to that temperature so everything gets pasteurized so because of the fruit being frozen it is going to take longer for us to reach that temperature but we have all the time the roll right but I'm not going to show you all that on video cuz that's just way too long once it's done I'm going to take it out of the water let it cool and let it sit for like two weeks that's it that's all we're going to do that's the only part you're not going to see and then we'll show you once it's cooled and sat for 2 weeks in about 2 seconds this has been sitting for um oh wow about three weeks on the fruit we wanted to get as much out of it as you can some people say it's done in a week some people say a month I think two to three weeks is probably sufficient I also wanted to give that pectic enzyme a little time to work because as you can see it's still a little bit cloudy now ultimate Clarity is not that important to us but we don't want it to be like soup you know I like P soup and all but I really don't want it in my meat so luckily all of our fruit fell but we pasturized it so it was it was good to go yeah that's the thing this has been pasteurized so it there's there it's inert nothing's going to happen we're good um do we want to take a final reading just to be on the safe side yeah because we added the fruit we don't really know how much of that extracted into the liquid this is more a curiosity than anything it was at 0.992 last we looked at it so let's just see just for S's and G's you know cuz I don't I don't say those things on camera oh boy did that clear out yeah that's beautiful it's lovely in the fermentor it's hard to see sometimes I smell strawberry yeah I I think this is going to surprise us pleasantly so it ain't floating now here's the thing there's a little bit of sugars that are in the fruit okay and I'm I'm thinking that some of it leeched into the liquid that's all we're measuring at this point not really changing the oh yeah it definitely did it's at 1.00 well let me get rid of those bubbles and be more precise here 1.4 so we actually leeched got about 12 points worth of sugars from the fruit which is like almost about a/4 pound of sugars so that's pretty impressive um wow that's actually really amazing cuz 2 and a 12 pounds of of fruit at a quarter yeah okay cool but that's natural sweetening so we may not need to sweeten this quite as much as we might have before so we'll find out more soon when we were contemplating what we were going to do with this we we had found some preconceived ideas and directions of where we're going and we meaning me and then we started thinking about it and that we be me and thinking okay so this is strawberry banana uh I really don't Envision a strawberry banana flavor combination being carbonated what am I doing I don't know all right yeah I I had envisioned that we're going to use non-fermentable sugars and we're going to prime it and carbonate or we could force carb either way and she says I don't really want that carbonated well okay that changes it changes the Paradigm just slightly so we came up with other ideas of where we want might want to go and then we decided the best route would be to taste it yep and then decide now something else of note um we started at 1.05 2 ended at 0.992 that comes out to to about 7.8% of ABV so it's almost a wine we're calling this a hydromel because it's on the lighter side of a real Mead but it is almost a wine um from a preservation standpoint you like I like to see 10 but it's not Uber critical and all things considered if it's packaged properly and everything it should still last years on the Shelf no problem um so we're going to taste it and see where we go and that I like that organic form of recipe making um also keep in mind our videos are instructional we're meant to teach you a lot of things not make this thing it's more of here's how you work around this problem here's how you fix that problem here's what to do when you have 2 and half pounds of mixed fruit and you don't know what to do with it all right so I've mentioned more than once when fermenting strawberries that they leech their color and and Brian didn't want to show you but I did because I wanted you to see there's strawberries in there and that's what they look like after they've leeched their color they kind of turn this light tan it's crazy that's normal don't freak out so curiously enough we ended up with exactly one US gallon 128 o on the nose crazy wow that smells incredible it really does so what we want to do now is we're going to start to taste alterations and for that we just pour a little sample the fruit comes through very nicely it's a little thin but hydromel not a lot of honey in there going to be a little thin but the flavor is actually really nice it's a little light it needs it needs needs some substance all right so one of the things that we thought about is like okay if we do want this to be carbonated we can back sweeten with unfermentable sugar and then go ahead and use priming sugar fermentable Prim primming sugar obviously to create a natural carbonation bottle that do that thing uh we would have to add yeast to that point because this is already past dry so all these that's in there are dead d e a d dead d e d d e d dead yeah d e d dead so you just don't say the a you don't spell it correctly you spell it incorrectly all right my it's like Homer with smart smart right I remember that one smrt all right so that's one route but because I thought strawberry banana for some reason the sparkling banana just seems weird to me so I didn't want to go that route my my perspective on things if you think that's awesome then go for it do your thing we could also sweeten it however way we want to and then Force carbon if we wanted to be carbonated cuz then we wouldn't have to worry about if we're using a fermentable sugar or non-fermentable sugar but then we came to a conclusion of wait this is a hydromel which is a Meade so we should have a a nice little obious punch of honey yeah I'm not getting any honey in it right now so we're gonna back sweeten it with honey a thing about back sweetening and we've seen this recently and it really confused us is that people were taking back sweetening as a mistake and that you should add all the fermentable sugar up front and I want to put a kaios on that notion right now because that's not a helpful mindset back sweetening is an adjustment to a flavor profile and you won't know if it's necessary until you're done even if you ferment something doesn't necessarily mean that back sweetening is going to be necessary I said that all wrong but Brian has a point well we tend to like things sweet there are times that we have gone with dry but what I like is the control by fermenting it dry and knowing it should go dry which we have a video explaining how that works if you do that then it's up to you where it ends up rather than trying to aim for overpowering it or overpowering the yeast or anything like that what was happening is like say we do three l pounds of honey in a brew and then we added half a pound in back sweetening people are saying oh well because you use three and2 pounds of honey total I'm just going to put that in up front you're not going to get the same result not necessarily you might you might not you might stall you might have a problem otherwise um you could get off flavors you could get off odors all sorts of things cuz you might stress the yeast that half pound could make a difference depending on the yeast depending on the environment your yeast could also ferment it out dry anyway and you and then you s to back seden but now you're talking a higher alcoholic beverage that's going to taste different most of the times we start with our original gravity or what our perspective what we intend our original gravity to be as a comfortable fermentable sugar range for the yeast because we don't want to stress our yeast we want our yeast to be happy and we want them to do their job which which is to ferment our Brew into alcohol if we push the fermentable sugars at the very beginning we can cause some problems and that is one of our biggest concerns with hearing people saying oh I'm just going to add all the sugar at the beginning please don't do that you may be causing a serious problem for yourself follow our recipes and listen to what we're saying and hopefully all the different parts cuz all these ratios play together and are so important the fitable sugars the pH the everything it's it's it's all not just halfhazard put together there is thought and purpose to each part it may seem like we're just chaotic beings going crazy being silly making Bru but there's actually a lot of thought behind what we're doing and we do actually have a lot of preparation beforehand believe it or not I want to say like Ripley it or not oo you getting the honey honey it changed it it changed it oh yeah now it's like a dessert with the dled honey on top now so I know somebody's going to be like well how much honey did you put in I don't know about half a pound maybe not a lot we're going to measure the gravity at the end so I can tell you more what happened too much oh she's happy okay my thoughts on this it's still a little watery it needs more mouth Fu that's bothering me there's not enough I actually think oaking this is a good idea okay I wasn't going to go there but I think it is I'm also thinking a little acid is not a bad thing this needs some brightness and because we're low on the ABV a little acid might help stabilize it as well yeah help to keep it yeah all right so are we doing I also think it needs a little more sweetness though all right if we're going to do the acid are we doing acid blend yeah we're going to just use acid blend okay so I'm just going to put in a little bit more honey I don't think it needs a lot more sweetness but it does need a touch more um more body is what happens from that um it it still tastes kind of watery to me but it's a hydromel and they tend to be watery just by Nature so it's barely a hydromel it's like 8% though it's close says it right there on the label what's in a name okay so we have it racked we have it sweetened a little bit um I think it's probably good on sweetness but there's other things that need to be done so one of them we're going to add some wood before we make those additions why don't we go ahead and take a gravity reading so we can tell them how much we sweetened it sure I was just explaining what I did with the wood yeah yeah okay I chose just a medium Char uh French Oak and it's sitting in boiling water to sanitize it and you know leech off some of the extra TS but this gravity reading will actually tell you about how much sugar we added to it and by Sugar we mean honey some people get confused we say sugar in the Brewing world is just fermentable sugars that comes from various sources in this case it's honey didn't add a did not add a tremendous amount here uh looks like 1.022 so that puts it in the it's a sweet me um not overly so but pretty sweet I think see I like strawberry and banana to have sweeter flavors so that that's probably where that comes from the first thing that I want to add to it though is acid blend and this is just North Mountain Supply acid blend you can get this on Amazon or your Homebrew Supply and this is a mixture of Malik acid citric acid and TARC acid they say one teaspoon per gallon increases the acidity by .1% so I'm going to start with half a teaspoon just to get an idea now you might be wondering why am I adding acid to this we're adding it for that brightness that little pop that acid gives it gives a cleansing sensation so sometimes s if things feel dull for lack of a better explanation acid is going to enhance the flavor and make it more sharp sharp bright those are those are usually the things used to describe it it also helps to uh preserve it a little bit we have never used the commercially purchased acid blend as a flavor adjustment sometimes we've used uh Citrus particularly lemon so this is new this is this is a thing so I'm playing it safe yeah wow that woke it up a little bit mhm I think I could go a little bit more though I think strawberries need that little bit of an acid okay so you agree yeah the Banana's coming through oh yeah I'm going to do another half teaspoon I'm always shocked at how lovely fermented banana beverages come out because it's just not a pleasant experience while you're doing it they're really weird I mean you're you're looks like something you throw away not put in your body if you didn't want to use the acid blend you could just add some lemon juice to this just be careful is too much and it's going to start to taste weird but you certainly can I mean it's like in cooking you know people use lemon juice to bring up the acid level things like that um I suppose you could use vinegar but I wouldn't cuz this one's under 10% so you might actually make vinegar vinegar no I would not I would not I no I also don't think the flavors would mild nicely why am I getting the baster I don't need baster don't no stinking baster another thing that you possibly could add I don't Brian's probably going to me upset about this is a strawberry lemonade uh because that way you're going to get the acidic punch of both the strawberry and the lemon I don't have a problem with that that will I think blend nicely since this is a strawberry uh beverage that's perfect mhm it's got a lovely sweetness that the acidity level brought up to that sweetness level balances out really really nice now now I just it's a little watery I want some more mouth feel I want a little bit of the vanilla pop to bring those flavors out a bit more the wood is really going to do that this is turning out to be a really really cool all so you have me sanitizing a true fermentor but we intend to put wood in it that's a problem that is a problem well guess what do I have have to cut the wood in half I don't think that's going to work suggestions how wide is it is a wide chunk it's not super wide let's see if it'll fit okay so here's the thing with these you can get it in but you're not going to get it out don't think you get it back out so we're just going to use a wide B yeah be right back we racked it and we had this much left over there was a tiny amount left and I'm just going to take the wood out of the hot water it's not that hot anymore cuz it's been sitting in there for about 5 or 10 minutes and just drop it in there and that'll sit in there for probably about two weeks usually that's pretty pretty good for oaking drink that on there good we put it back under airlock just to be safe in case we didn't kill all the yeast and starts fermenting we won't have a an explosion but we will monitor that and um we got all our notes added and what we're going to do with it now I'm going let it sit going to go back into fermentation station apparently I didn't put it where she wanted me to put it so we need more tape it's all right we'll take but that doesn't matter we'll do that off camera and we'll see you in about two seconds all right so it's been two weeks this thing's been sitting on the French Oak but I do want to show you something first it cleared it got really really nicely clear let me show you what it looks like okay I think you can see that that it's really beautifully clear let me show you the bottom there's like that moonscape thing going on so that's all over sediment that fell out after I'm assuming we had to have pasteurized this because we used honey to sweeten it to 1.022 but yeah that's just beautiful seat you can see the yolk is still in there that's right we pasteurized it when we put in the fruit so then the honey went in afterwards which is interesting because if the honey had wild yeast on it it is possible to have fermented slightly but I don't know what what ABV were we at cuz I didn't write that down so let's see what we start started at we started at 1.52 minus .992 time that's high enough I'm going to go with 135 gives us 8.1% it was at 1.004 after pasteurizing and fruit Edition and we sweetened it to 1.022 you know what we need to do we need to take a reading on this all right let me get the equipment okay before we go much further my hand was just dunked into star sand I'm going to very gingerly grab the Oak and pull it out if anyone's worried about infection that's about the least worrisome pull of wood you should worry wow okay wow that's about the least I'm not even going to go there don't worry about it just take take a reading okay in there now if you're wondering why I'm taking a reading it is because there is a possibility that if the honey that we added had wild yeast that had sufficient gumption to do so it may have been able to ferment in an already 8% Brew after having been pasturized pasteurization doesn't kill the sweetness or the fermentability it kills the yeast okay that's important to know we've been asked a lot recently can you pasteurize then back sweeden and yes you certainly can however if you're using honey you got to be careful and we were lucky 1.022 didn't change at all nothing to worry about so I'm not gonna I don't even need to wor there's no gumption it had no gumption all right so let's just pour our samples I should just drink from the test tube but I'm not going to going to need a little bit more for me that's not much of a sample now is it all right let's just put the lid on there just to keep keep it safe just came out of star sand so it's all drippy okay first thing I want to say it actually did clear quite nicely there's the slightest amount of haze like if you look through the side of the glass I can see Haze but from top to bottom you don't see it it's it's it's like a nine on the clarity scale if you want to really give it a score the color is pretty yeah it's a very pretty color on the smell now this is strawberry banana sure is oh yeah un un undeniably yeah wow the strawberry really has that like almost a I want to say a iic punch to it and then the banana just is nice nice and soft but I'm actually getting the vanillin from the oak coming through too so far I'm kind of impressed now we sweeten this to taste 1.022 so it's considered you know medium sweet um let's go in for a try all right do you recall back a little while ago we were talking about how we pasteurized the fruit fruit so we didn't need to pasteurize it after back sweetening the Brian said but wait we packed sweetens with honey and the honey could have had natural yeasts and it could referment and look what happened yeah let me show you its features it's foamy see all those bubbles that's nuts it was not there see how they keep making new baby bubbles yeah to make more bubbles that's that's fermentation that's what that is so yeah I went in to get this because we were supposed to do the final tasting right now we're just going to give a score and be done right yeah know and that is something that I hadn't considered until fairly recently that if you do back sweeten with honey and you have a lower ABV product and you do it after you pasteurize it is possible and apparently here's your proof that it could restart fermentation so what do we have to do with this now well right now we're going to take a gravity reading to see just how much more fermentation actually did occur yep I'm seeing stuff King all the way up the sides this thing got more active than I thought so I'm thinking it fermented pretty pretty strongly it was a 1.022 so let's see what's at now and yes I'm aware had we back sweetened with like allulose or orthol or something this wouldn't have happened but we also wouldn't have had the honey character so there because this is actually going to add to the alcohol content of the brew as well so that's not that it's critical but it's something to be aware of it's bubbly it's very gassy you know oh wow it actually went down to 0.994 oh jeez all righty then so I would like to say we did this on purpose to illustrate the problems of back sweetening after pasteurization but we didn't but we did it okay so I want to do some math here because this is technically a step feed now so let's let's figure out where we're at so we start at 1. 052 minus our first ending gravity 0.992 gives me 06 right so 060 and then at the end we have an original gravity of 1 022 and that's when we back sweeten to honey that's what our our secondary original gravity yeah minus today's gravity 994 so that's another 028 in gravity now 028 plus the 060 gives us 088 multiply that by 135 and we have 11.88% in a hydromel so guess what yeah I'm saying this ain't no hydrel no more yeah okay so we're we we're going to call it a hydrel because this is a good learning experience though it's not a hydromel um it's still fermenting I can see bubbles coming up the side so so now what we need to do is it went totally dry again which means the flavor is going to be different so we need to Rack it to a pitcher because we have sediment again yes and then we're going to have to back sweeten again to flavor right and then we're going to have to pasteurize it so let's get to it strawberry banana hydrel continuation part 72 all right so we were racking that Brian made a good point he said hey we could just res sweeten it back sweeten again to the original back sweetening but then he had a second very good point and that was we have more alcohol now which might mean we might need more or less back sweetening to balance out those flavors do we have a tasting glass we do oh she's hiding them from me now um yeah I mean we have more alcohol so it's it's a considerable amount more we were at 8% before now we're at 11.8 so yeah that could change everything I I don't even know anymore we're just kind of going with the flow we're going to make it taste good and look at all the education you're getting here said it before I'll say it again anybody that thinks our show is scripted nope I mean we knew this was refering but that's it we didn't know how much uh I did not expect that it would have blown through all that extra honey that we put in I no way and look at we have uh nucleation happening it's degassing itself which is good yes so risk of oxidizing this is pretty slim basically because it's still fermenting like as we speak it is fermenting right now I don't know what's fermenting but something in there still I think it's just degassing at this point um so yeah once we get this flavored exactly the way we like it again we are immediately going to do a bulk pasteurization of this entire jar now we have a full video demonstrating that entire process I'm going to make sure to link that into the description below so that way if you would like to do that as well which we strongly encourage you to do you can follow along that video I I would like to be more clear on something too I do not want people to think that you cannot use honey and then pasteurize you totally can you have to use honey before you pasturize now sugar any other sugar like sugar brown sugar cane sugar raw sugar sugar in the Raw all those things you could totally do those after pasteurization no harm they don't have yeast honey especially good honey can have yeast in it and that's what caused the problem because when you pasteurize you don't kill the sugars you kill the yeast so we added more honey that could have had a wild yeast in it it was just kind of a a stairstep train of events that needed to happen it's a Snowball Effect if you will it's an unfortunate series of events I mean it's kind of neat actually you know um but this is no longer a hydrel which means now we actually have to make a hydrel which we are bound and determined to do we had a little conversation while we were rocking it and so that's going to be our next on the to-do list will it be next I don't know if it'll be next we have we have two brewes that are coming that we're going to start and then after that yeah see when you say next on the to-do list that makes me think it's like the next thing we're going do next after the other things next after all the other things we doing yeah interesting definitely more alcohol but also more fruity oh yeah oh yeah like it's more the strawberry more came more strawberry forward oh we had an acid blend and we oaked this too oh the acid should pop the strawberry the acid made the made it pop you are right the acid pop taken out of context that could be a whole look at look what she leaves me got to have a taste it's good I think I'd like it a little sweeter yeah but it's getting close yeah I I think I like it better now I'm not sad that it's no longer a hydral No it's I think I like this better than me it's strawberry banana me I don't think we ever did a strawberry banana me did we no no we never did so yay now we've done a strawberry banana hydral and a strawberry banana me in the same batch so glad didn't decide to carbonate this one oh golly well it would have been in a it would have been in a keg so I would have noticed something was up when the pressure shot up but that's about it it would have been carbonated oh yeah it definitely would have been carbonated you know happy accidents it's one of those things Bob Ross always said that and he wasn't wrong I mean oh we're making a Hyrum out oh look at that it's a me now it's a happy little me yeah I mean the pluses to having the higher ABV is you need to drink less of it and it'll preserve a little bit better though we've had ciders that we left oh yeah for a year or more no problem um they actually taste really good after a year yeah we don't usually do one-year tastings on ciders just because of possible preservation problems but but in the nearest Future nearish future we do have a one year of one of our ciders on the books y really all righty then okay I think that's hopefully that's mixed nope false Al just kidding but this is home brewing you know you start out with an idea you may think this is exactly what I want okay well things change you know we're dealing with living beasties here yeast are a living thing you never know what they're going to do and just like cats they don't they don't do what you tell them to do they don't cuz they don't have ears they do what they want to do they don't have ears they can't hear you and I'm pretty sure they don't speak English well yeah but that's not that's where cats cats have ears I'm not saying they're like cats you said that this should probably be enough definitely get more honey character now I think I want a little more I think I want it sweeter I think it's sweeter there's like a youngness to this now it's back to tasting young again isn't it it's it's got a a nice overall brightness and the oaking was helpful too I think that was that was a good idea yeah it added that little touch of vanilla in there m that works really well with the nice little pop strawberry banana combo but I think I want this sweet now all right well the thing is if you go sweet I got to drip all right Ro the thing is when you go sweet a lot of flavors will pop more like the banana is going to really start to come out more what yeah I agree and the strawberry even though it's kicked up by the acid I actually think sweetness helps with strawberries too nobody really describes strawberries as they're bitter or plain no it's usually a sweet juicy strawberry even though interestingly enough they actually have very little sugar yeah they're very tart if you really analyze their flavor profile berries in general are very and sweet Yep they're sweet tart yeah like me I wouldn't say you're so tart though did I do it now yes yeah let's go with yes it'll mix in the pasteurization process is uh wonderful for homogenizing a brew I think that that's a nice sweetness now it's not overly sweet like I'm I'm going to I'm going to bet it's probably not as sweet as we made it last time time to check before anybody freaks out yeah I washed my finger [Music] again people think that because we make cuts and wash things off screen that we're not yeah you don't want to watch us washing things or not really a lot of fun empty set d star sand I mean really everything gets cleaned like 15 times guess what yeah we went right to oh we did go touch higher but see those bubbles are doing it too the degassing can cause some interference with your hydrometer reading so it's a good thing to try to take that in consideration so yeah we actually went to 1.024 all right so now we're going to put that sample back into our jar fermenter fermenter it's not just a jar well it is a jar no it's not it's a jar the door is a jar it's not a door it's a jar when we play D and D every time there's a door I'll always say is it slightly open and then I'll say okay the jar it took a while for some people to figure out what I was saying the door is a jar yeah bad jokes what we do now babe we are going to pasteurize this and by pasteurize I mean we're going to bring the internal temperature to 140° fenhe which is a Celsius number that I'll put right here because I can never remember what it is for 22 minutes you keep it at that temperature for 22 minutes then we're going to remove it from the heat the heated water and it's going to cool and then it's going to sit on the shelf and we're going to make sure that it doesn't ferment again if it does we will be back to show you again how we do what we just did again or we might just say we did it again and now it's here but because we're pasteurizing it it's probably going to be fine but we're going to do that and then we'll be back to taste this in about two seconds okay so it's been another week so this has been a crazy ride we pasteurized this yet again and it did not show any more activity in the airlock so it's time for its final tasting that's my story and I'm sticking to it smells good good and remember this went up to almost 12% now yeah so it's it's it's officially a me I mean hydrel is a me too but you know what I [Music] mean beautiful Clarity just the slightest slightest Haze but I mean I wouldn't really even consider that Haze it definitely looks like a me color I know that seems silly but in the jar it's getting more of its orange ton but and the glass is just looking Golden Rod that color we like to it's like a 9.5 Clarity it smells Lov strawberry banana on the smell strawberry banana honey oh the honey okay the first whiff I got strawberry banana was on the end when I went in again the Honey comes through yeah and that was what was missing for me last time so I'm really glad we went ahead and added more honey to this they seem to have melded together it's almost creamy me it has a smells me really this this smells awesome all right I'm going in cuz it's making me thirsty oh that's good that's very good it's got just enough sweetness to really bring out the flavors of the fruit it's got that sweet T but it's what did we sweeten to 1.024 so it's it's a it's a pretty sweet meat it's not like over crazy sweet but 1.024 is is fairly sweet but I think we mentioned before that strawberries have that sharp tartness to them naturally and then when you ferment them it seems to really enhance that oh yeah they have a they have a peccant flavor is it peccant I have no idea but it sounds nice sounds sounds good somebody's going to correct me they always do it's okay a day without learning is not a good day I don't know I don't have a good saying for that but this is nice I I'm actually not upset at all that it refermented last time cuz I think this is better now than it was the first time we sweeten did yeah yeah something evolved a little bit more so this is a perfect example of a little bit more ethanol actually enhanced it now I'm going to say something and Brian's probably going to give me a look remember initially this was supposed to be a low ABV and we thought it was going to be a sparkling thing kind of like a cider but I thought it she and then when we got it together and we started thinking about it or at least I started thinking about it I'm like I don't know the strawberry banana combo really doesn't read like it should be sparkling and then when we tasted it before it decided to continue its little journey of fermentation I was still in that mindset where nope this should be still the strawberry banana all good well now that it's no it's higher avv and I'm getting that no the little zing in my mouth I'm thinking oh well this could be sparkling it could it could I I I don't want to I don't want to either but it's interesting how even evolved and Chang when I tasted it before I was I was still good with my my choice of not carbonating it but now it's like a different creation oh and I could see it carbonated this is so nice though also see it chilled chilled I think this will be fabulous this would be fantastic chill I also think in a year this is going to be absolute like gold in a glass it has this lovely smoothness that fills your mouth and it's just it's so rich without being like it's not like that thick cloin thing it's not like that at all and as weird as fermenting bananas is and I will go to my dying breath that for many bananas are just weird I need more it just creates this unique sensation not only in the flavor but in the texture and it creamy is the best word to use for that even though it's it's not a creamy beverage don't think that there's like it's like slimy in the glass no it just creates this gives a mouth feel of creaminess yeah it's nice yeah I'm I'm quite impressed I I thought this was going to be nice when it was first fermented and sweetened but the honey character really comes through so much more now than it did before now it speaks me where before it was almost like a strawberry banana wine so did we have a guess on the final ABV for this I know yeah this is somewhere in like 11 to 12% okay by the time we diluted a little bit with some honey it's it's like 11 11 and a half something like that which is perfectly fun mhm it's got just enough tartness with the strawberry give a little zing on the tongue yeah it's really nice it it's definitely reading to me strawberry banana me I'm getting strawberry I'm getting banana and I'm getting honey I'm even getting the little teeny tiny hint of the bitter note on the back of my throat that I haven't gotten in in some of our needs lately it's working with hurtness oh yeah it's it's not a discorded note it's just like part of that bitter note is never discordant it's always a part of it but it's it's just a an identifier to me like if I tasted a wine versus meat if you had trouble telling that note is like the identifier to know that it's me this interesting thing happened when we do tastings and we try to be as verbose as possible to give you all the identifiers of what we're getting in this experience and lots of times if we say anything that could be remotely taken as a negative some people just go off the deep end and think oh you should just toss that yeah don't ever think that way we are literally trying to describe it as well as we can and if there's anything negative sometimes we're reaching to find it yeah we have to describe it I mean that's all it is and we're doing the best that her enfeebled little brain she's going off with something that I said in a past video where I said it was dead in the mouth and all I meant was it was a muted flavor it didn't mean and I even said I hate to use the term but it's the best way to describe it but I can appreciate how you was a viewer you're not here in the room with us you're not sharing this lovely glass we gave like a nine or seven or something so maybe you you you convey or interpret what we're saying differently and so I just wanted to throw it in there and I didn't mean to go on this big old tent about it fine this is good information this is this is proper entertainment if you if you've seen any of our whiskey tastings uh which are they even still are they still live I don't even know I don't know they might be one is we we use terms like Band-Aid Tire leather chair charcoal old book yeah turpentine rubber yeah and like all of those descriptors are good positive things I was like when is oh I have notes of Band-Aid when is that a good thing it it just is it just is I don't know when you're a kid didn't you ever smell your Band-Aid if you you know that's what it's reminiscent of so we have gone off the rail we have but if we give any of our beverages over a five rating that means it's good it is not a failure regardless of what words we use to describe it it is not a failure below a five yeah I would consider that more or less a failure then you certainly need some improvement all right so I've derailed that enough let's get to the numbers I think we're ready for that right so the first one is repeatability like a five yeah we we didn't okay now this is okay to get it to the point that we got it to it's a five to get it to where we got it to before we had to redo it rep Pastor is a 10 because all you'd have to do is honey to it would have been fine add the honey then pasturize yeah that's what I mean yeah what she said don't do what he says do what he means but they know what I meant regardless of that mishap I'm glad that it happened and we that we recorded it and shared it with you so that way you understand the difference between when to pasteurize versus when to back sweeten and why it's important something else about pasturization this has come up in our VIP recently some people were talking about pasteurizing there's apparently some confusion about temperatures and times and things like that 140 fahit internal temperature of the Brew itself for 22 minutes pasteurizes to the appropriate amount now you can go higher but that means you need less time but the reason we don't go higher is thermal shock can be a real problem the the breaking of glass is a real problem so the higher you go with that the more likely it is to be a fail okay so that's why we go to 140 cuz that's like the bare minimum I mean you can in theory go longer at lower temperatures but it's best this this way you get the least amount of change of flavor and the most safety because it's the least amount of time and all that kind of it's like The Bu locks exactly it just it's it's not too long it's just trust me on this do it the way we we've said to do it that said we do have in the works for future der and Brian to do a test on some different times temperatures to see if there's a flavor difference right um also another thing that we've said it and we may have put too fine a point on it and some people have taken it as gospel that it ages it no it does not age the meat in any way it gives some of the components of something that's been sitting for a while so it does give sort of an aged feel but it does not actually age the only thing that ages something is time time yeah that's it so it's sort of sometimes Mellows flavors but that's about it um it doesn't even always do that it doesn't always clear either no we had it clear several in a row and then like oh that's great most it really doesn't and then was like haha you put that out there so no we're not going to do that for you yeah so fun um all right also whoa whoaa there's more oh wait you do not lose alcohol if you pasteurize if you boiled it for hours in an open pot you'll lose some now we did have the the misconception that heating it open that the alcohol is just going to go right out of it well we actually had a chemist contact us and say hey here's the actual science to that and we're like thank you for sharing that important little bit of information I pasteurized it as you see here airlock on it and the whole thing and when it comes comes out of the hot water all we do is we make sure to pull the airlock out every once in a while so it doesn't back splash right because when it starts to cool down it's going to create reverse pressure and may you will see bubbling you will see airlock activity while it's pasteurizing it's because there's gases in there that are coming out plus it's expanding yeah it's just that's the way it works so don't freak out and don't worry about it pasteurizing I mean here's the thing we've been pasteurizing Brews for a long time we have lost one bottle and it was a weak piece of crap glass bottle that I didn't like anyway but that's not why it broke we it broke because I think they were bouncing around yeah we didn't do the safety we didn't have it set up there were there was an actual bottle like gu a one liter bottle as a matter of fact and it was before soused right it was it was we weren't Sous eeding yet it was so in all the times that we've done it we lost one bottle so don't be worried that you're going to you know no just no all right so now we have to get back on track to how do you feel personally all right let me go over our scoring system it's 1 through 10 with the occasional 11 I and I need more Let me let me pour some while I explain this for science yes give me your glass please cuz I know you want more too um so it's 1 through 10 with the occasional 11 one is basically we're going to dump it I mean we're going to tell you all the stuff that's wrong with it what we don't like about it and then we're going to dump it as soon as we get off camera whoops up to a five is varying levels of going to dump it to it's there I'll drink it not my favorite thing good for a mixer yeah it wouldn't be my first choice but you know I yeah it's tolerable if somebody poured it for me I'm not going to turn it away from 5 to 10 is now this is starting to get pretty good all the way to 10 is I know I want that one I haven't seen it yet I know it's on the Shelf I want it 11 is I wanted it last week and I just haven't gotten to it yet most of my top shelf back here is is all my high high profile right anyway so that's our scoring system you'll notice we're using the Glen Carn again for tastings I think this is the most appropriate for tasting it's going to give us all the Aromas all the smells and it gives a more consistent flavor profile across the board we looked for larger Glen carons we canot find if anybody can Source them for me let me know we do have some friends Jeff and Jenny hi guys who miraculously found some some at like b lindies or something like that some department store like a Marshalls kind of thing uh yeah a department store this is so good uh we can't we can't we went looking the other day couldn't find them we did find larger versions not fullon Brandy sniffs cuz they those are huge but like yeah we have like little CNAC glasses yeah we yeah I like those and those work really well they will be highlighted on the upcoming Instagram posts for City Bruce anyway what's our number okay this is a tough one for me all right I I I have a number are you ready go away go away go away go away cat intrusion you have a number I conflicted got to give a number one 2 3 9.5 I was bouncing all over with my numbers I landed why are you so low I planed on eight because I have been drinking an awful lot of glue glue Vine recently so I'm like on the mold which we did a couple weeks ago wine you would have seen it uh not it hasn't actually come out as of the time that we're recording this but by the time you see this it'll have come out so I I'm just like permanently spiced wine in the brain and so this is obviously not a spiced wine this is it was never meant to this is more of a not even technically summertime drink yeah and I'm not I'm not there I guess I'm being a basic I hate that ter I was going to go 10 cuz to me this is about as good as I can expect a strawberry banana me to be sure if somebody said what should a strawberry banana me taste like I would say it should taste like this this is it now this is a basic version you can go all kinds of crazy we could have added spices and herbs and stuff to it and changed it all kinds of ways this is great as it is okay you can expand it if you want to I don't think you should for the first time making it I think you should make it just like this and then maybe if you want to alter the flavors do so but I did not go 10 for the simple reason that I feel the strawberry tartness is that much too much it is a little pronounced just just just that much which puts this and this is a categorization thing that we haven't talked about in a while I don't think where I talk about what category would I put this in would would it be a sipper would it be with a meal would would it be an intellectual or would be a dessert wine it's a before or an after for me it's a combination of all those things and that's really unusual because normally I I I'm like nope this is this is the category I'm I would not drink this with food I think this would be delightful with like some dessert type things like a with dessert that's different but I mean like like cake you don't like cake you're not a cake guy so but I'm not going to sit down to a plate of pasta and have this but like Strawberry Shortcake in this would be but that's dessert that would be awesome it's dessert wine um a salad with fruit raspberry vinegret kind of scenario I think this would be lovely with that a cheese plate for example or fruit plate or a cheese and fruit plate sure but now you're getting into desserts and Atif again right but that's still food and still pairing it with the flavors and the textures of the food you're right semantics I know and it's painful for you but I digress but also I enjoy thinking about this one yeah this is an experience I didn't think haha that I would think about strawberry banana me there's a lot of complexity a lot layers there's a lot of things going on there with the the interplay of the the honey notes and then that sharpness of the strawberry that is pronounced a little with a little bit of alcohol punch that creaminess of the banana of the ban brings it all together it really just Ms it it's really interesting intellectually to think about all those different components mhm absolutely um I just want a hot mold wine right now so that's the only reason why I gave it the low low score eight we're just going to call her score of nine cuz she's in the moood that's why I'm laughing my low low score of eight because it's still the damn good score but literally the only thing that held it back for me was that teeny tiny bit of tartness on the strawberry that was just a little too much I mean it was just slightly more pronounced and I'm being very specific in my words so that no one says oh it's crap throw it away no it's just strawberry was a little bit more pronounced than I would prefer some people will taste this and go Bri what are you talking about there isn't enough strawberry right that's a possibility and everybody has their own bias and that's why our scores are just our scores they're not really set in stone there's no standard yeah I could taste this again next week and go this is a seven what was I thinking now my cocktail brain is going crazy right now and thinking oh this is kind of of reminding me of you're mix this with quantra orange a mimosa profile with like a champagne and maybe some orange juice in there with the strawberry and banana would be meanwhile I would just chill it put it in a glass and drink it that's my cocktail all right a glass and a liquid it's multi-art it's a cocktail anyway if you have any questions on this Brew please leave them in the comment section below and Ryo make sure to get you as soon as you possibly humanly can and as always guys thank you so much for watching and have a great great day byebye

Channel: City Steading Brews

Views: 38,297

Keywords: mead, how to make mead, mead at home, homemade mead, strawberry mead, honey wine, strawberry honey wine, banana mead, banana honey wine, how to make strawberry banana mead, hydromel mead, making mead, meadmaking, mazer

Id: jYjeoa2RzJo

Length: 76min 25sec (4585 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 21 2024