Monthly Archives: June 2007

Making Mead: The controversy over boiling

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It used to be pretty common for meadmakers to boil the honey-water mixture, but more and more are preparing their meads without heat. Ken Schramm makes a good case for the no-heat method in his The Compleat Meadmaker : Home Production of Honey Wine From Your First Batch to Award-winning Fruit and Herb Variations. Adherents of this method are taking aim at the older practice of boiling. They argue that there is no need to kill or suppress spoilage organisms because they can’t survive in honey anyway. Honey will last for years at room temperature without going bad, so I think they’re right about this. When they say that boiling, even briefly, will “ruin” honey or “drive off it’s delicate aroma,” I become more skeptical.

I’ve made mead both ways, and I just haven’t noticed that the no-boil or no-heat meads are any more aromatic. If there really is a difference in aroma between boiled and no-heat meads, then it’s too small a difference to notice in a casual way. So in February 2006 I started two 1-gallon batches of mead. I prepared them the same way except that one was boiled and one was not. When they’re ready to drink, and I don’t expect that before February 2009, I plan to have a blind tasting party. Maybe we’ll notice something. Maybe not.

Suppose that there isn’t a difference in aroma. If you don’t need to boil for sanitation, why boil at all? You might want to boil for clarity. Simple meads (just honey, water, yeast, nutrient, and acid) will not clear on their own to my satisfaction. I’ve written about fining with bentonite, and that’s one way to clear your mead. Another is to boil the honey water mixture. I have found that a short boil, about five to ten minutes, will clear mead just as effectively as bentonite.

So my current thinking, and this may change with the results of the tasting party or other new information, is that a short boil does no harm and can be useful in clearing your mead. It is not necessary if you’d rather fine, if you’re not concerned about clarity, or if you think that your mead gets sufficiently clear on its own.

Update 10/28/2008 I ran a controlled experiment to test the effects of boiling. After a carefully arranged double blind tasting, the results are in! Boiling does indeed weaken the aroma of mead, but may improve the body and smooth out the flavor.

Sur Lie In A Bottle?

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I wrote about sur lie and batonnage, aging on fine lees and lees stirring, recently. After six months of weekly stirring, this process can benefit the wine (or mead?) by making it seem sweeter and less harsh. Scientists have studied this process and isolated the compounds responsible for this effect. One example of a product you can buy is Laffort’s Oenolees (formerly “Biolees”).

I don’t know how well these products work. In fact, I’ve only just begun looking into this aspect of winemaking. I’m trying it out on a batch of rhubarb wine and a portion of my recent batch of mead. Once I can answer the question, “How does sur lie and batonnage affect rhubarb wine? or mead?” then I can try some of these products and make direct comparisons.

Buying A Digital Camera

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Steam Engine In A Sports Car: Using a film camera to illustrate my blog

I own two cameras: a Ricoh KR-5 and a Yashica T4. Both are 35mm film cameras. The Ricoh is a manual SLR and the Yashica is a point-and-shoot. They’re great cameras, and when I started, I intended to use them to illustrate my blog. The delay in shooting a roll of film, developing it, and scanning the negatives made it difficult to write about what I was currently doing. Some of my blog entries are about what I did, or how something looked, a week ago. I’ve been borrowing Marsha’s digital camera, and I just never imagined how much I would love having a finished digital image the same day (or hour!) I took the photo. So I’ve been thinking about getting my own compact digital camera. I’ve done a lot of research, and I have a good idea of what I want and why.

Megapixels: Too much of a good thing

Manufacturers have been competing on resolution, with each new generation of digital camera featuring more megapixels than the last. Since the physical size of the camera’s sensor has not been growing at the same rate, or at all, each pixel must be captured with less light. What’s happening is that the camera lets in a certain amount of light while it’s shutter is open. This light is divided up by a grid in order to produce a picture, each square on the grid is a pixel. As you increase the resolution (megapixels) and keep the sensor size the same, you divide that same amount of light into more, and smaller, pixels.

There is actually a photocollector for each pixel on the camera’s sensor, and as it tries to determine what that particular pixel should look like it still encounters a certain amount of noise. This noise is inherent in any electrical sensor and doesn’t decrease for the convenience of camera manufacturers. Have you ever heard of the “signal to noise ratio?” Well in digital cameras, it’s been going down (less signal in each pixel, same noise). Most manufacturers have reacted by trying to clean up the noise after the fact.

Bucking The Trend: Bigger sensor, fewer megapixels

They’re getting very clever about doing this, but it’ll never be as good as producing a good clean picture to begin with. That’s what Fujifilm has done with it’s Fuji Film F31fd Finepix 6.3 MP Digital Camera. It’s six megapixels provide plenty of resolution for most purposes, and it’s sensor is larger than most (maybe all) compact digital cameras. The result is good clean pictures even in low light. Fuji has recently released a newer model in this line of cameras, the Fujifilm Finepix F40fd 8.3MP Digital Camera with 3x Optical Zoom (Silver). It features more megapixels and a bigger sensor to accommodate them. This new camera is probably an improvement, but I just don’t know enough yet to say for sure. I’d feel very comfortable buying the F31fd, and if I had to buy a camera today that would be the one. I’d like to see some independent reviews of the F40fd before I decide which of the two to buy.

Bottle Washing Day

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In an episode of MASH, Winchester complains that he’s the only one making an effort to keep the tent, that he shares with Hawkeye and Trapper-or-BJ (it’s been long enough that I get those two confused), tidy. The other two make messes, and he cleans them up. “It may not be a good system,” admits Trapper-or-BJ, “but at least it’s a system.” Marsha and I have grown into a similar system for bottle washing. I immediately rinse empty wine bottles and put them on the counter “until I can wash them.”

Empty bottles take up more and more counter space until Bottle Washing Day

Now, washing bottles isn’t my favorite part of winemaking, so that doesn’t happen right away. The bottles accumulate, Marsha eventually rebels at the loss of counter space (you bachelors out there might not be familiar with that term; I’m still trying to understand it myself), and I clean the bottles. Maybe not a good system …

Sur Lie and Batonnage

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Winemakers can spend a fair amount of time racking. They do this to separate clear wine from it’s sediment (called “lees”). It’s more than just clear wine that motivates them; decaying grape, or other fruit, solids can encourage spoilage organisms and extended contact with decaying yeast can cause off flavors. So, an important rule in winemaking is avoid extended lees contact.

Except that extended contact with decaying yeast can be beneficial, providing enhanced body and mouth feel. That just goes to show you how simple, clear cut, and consistent winemaking can be 🙂 It’s really not the contradiction it seems; this is just a case of too much of a good thing can be bad for you (or your wine). Contact with “fine lees” – just yeast, none of those nasty decaying fruit solids – can be a good thing for up to six months. During that time, you’re trying to capture the benefits of Sur Lie while minimizing its adverse effects. Stirring the lees, “batonnage”, helps you do this. I give my carboys or jugs several sharp twists every week. After two or three months of this, you can cut back a little and stir monthly.

I first read about Sur Lie and Batonnage in Techniques In Home Winemaking (rev). It’s a complete book on making wine from grapes at home. From the grapes (or juice or concentrate) to bottling, with special sections on port, sparkling wine, and trouble shooting, it’s all there.