[COHO] melomel

[Tim Howe]

On Mon, 28 Jan 2008 13:59:04 -0800
"Tom Brohamer" <Tom at BBQnFools.com> wrote:

> Tim,
> 
> You are correct, what you are describing is a melomel (pronounced
> Mellow-mel, I believe.)  The question would be is if it is a Grape
> Melomel (Pyment, pronounced Pie-ment) or not?  Since the raisin was
> technically once a grape, it could be considered as such.

	This had occurred to me, but I didn't want to complicate matters further.  I decided that if a raisin was different enough from a grape to have a different name, then by extension so too would this be different enough from a pyment.

> As for it being a "short mead", what this term means is that the aging
> process is short.  You will not find a category called "short mead" in
> the BJCP Style Guidelines
> (http://www.bjcp.org/styles04/Category25.html).  A short mead is
> accomplished by using less sugars, and thus creating a lower starting
> gravity.  With the lower starting gravity, it's ready to drink in a
> shorter amount of time than a classic mead.  You may have already known
> this, but just thought I'd add it in for clarification's sake.

	I had also seen it called a "small mead", which was described as a traditional "peasant" drink.  Since I am using less than the ussual amount of honey in order to have a lighter drink I figured either designation would do.  I think I could pull off "peasant" =]

> If I assume you are making a 5 gallon batch of mead (and there's no
> reason you should make any less) then your recipe would be a lower
> gravity mead.  That said, since it is the melomel that is "short", and
> not the raisin itself, the name should probably be something like
> "raisin short melomel".  Personnally, I'd just call it a raisin melomel,
> and drop the short part, but that's just me.

	Yeah...  That's reasonable.

> I do have one question though, how do you intend to extract the sugars
> from the raisins?  Are you going to press them before, during, or after
> fermentation?  Just curious.

	I actually wasn't all that interested in extracting a lot of sugar from the raisins, but was really just going for some raisin flavor.  I plan to chop the raisins as fine as I can before getting lazy.  Then, once I have boiling water, I will toss them in and let it come just to a boil again and then kill the heat.  Then I plan on adding the honey, a squeeze of lemon (maybe even the juice of one whole lemon), and then cooling.  I was going to dump the raisins into the primary and leave them there for a couple of weeks before racking to a secondary.  I was planning on ending up with 4 gallons, but if I want to go lighter (or use more raisins) I may go to 5.

	I am, of course, eager to hear suggestions.

--timH