An Experiment: Belgian Candi Syrup Mead (recipe in comments)
Posted Jul 19, 2016, 1:47 PM UTC
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Also, looking forward to its progress. Keep us posted.
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This looks great. Would love to see how this turns out for you
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I've got something similar going as well with avocado honey and plums. Kind of a Belgian quad - mead. Looks good!
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makes me wonder if making a bochet is worth the effort (and lava burns) if you can sub in the candi syrup. this sounds promising!
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I am a big fan of using leftovers for future projects. A few weeks ago, I made a Belgian Dubbel. For it, I was going to use D-90 Belgian Candi Syrup. If you've never tasted D-90 Belgian Candi Syrup, it has a dark, rich flavor. It is reminiscent of toffee. A very nice flavor! For this batch of beer, I only used 10 oz of syrup. So at the end of the brew day, I sealed the remaining 6 oz and threw it in the freezer.
As I was thinking about what mead to make next, I looked in the fridge and saw the candi syrup. I wasn't going to use it any time soon for a beer and even if I did, I would certainly need more than what I had. I looked online to see if anyone had used this for a wine or mead but I only found a few thinking about it but no end result. So I decided to experiment.
1 Gallon
The day before pitching the yeast, I combined everything and added 1 campden tablet in order to handle any contaminants from the syrup. After some vigorous shaking to homogenize it all (the syrup has a high viscosity), I got a reading of 1.068 SG and a very deep, dark color.
One issue with using Belgian Candi Syrup in beer is that it could thin out the body. I did not want this happening to the mead so I doubled the amount of raisins I typically use in order to increase the tannin. I also decided to use Montrachet yeast as it is known to produce more full-bodied wines and meads. Montrachet will also be able to handle bringing the mead to 1.000.
Originally I planned to use clover honey but didn't realize that I had grabbed the orange blossom by mistake. Oh well. Perhaps it will add some more complexity to the batch.
I don't know what I plan on doing after fermentation is complete and I have no idea what the end result will be. It will definitely be interesting.
I think it will be good. The syrup won't thin out your mead any more than the same volume of honey added in. They're both 100% fermentable.
I have quite a bit of leftover things (including D-180 I think) and intend to do some what-the-hell type ferments just to use the ingredients and see what happens. Keep us posted.