Rooibos Chai Metheglin 1.0

A friend is currently attempting to motorize my grain mill, which rules out brewing any beer this weekend. I decided to do another mead instead, to keep in practice.

Being a fan of Indian food, when I ran across a recipe for a Rooibos Chai Metheglin (metheglin is mead that includes spices) I decided it sounded like a good option. While that recipe used plain Rooibos tea and spices, I'm going to use Rooibos tea bags which already contain a blend of Chai spices. Will it make as good a mead? We'll find out.

Ingredients

2.5 pounds Clover Honey

3/4 teaspoon Yeast Nutrient

1/4 teaspoon Yeast Energizer

4 teabags of Rooibos Chai Tea

1 packet Montrachet Wine Yeast

1 gallon of water

Brewing

Place one gallon of water in a stock pot and bring to a boil. Boil for 10 minutes to sterilize and remove chlorine.

Steep the tea bags in the water while adding the honey, yeast nutrient, and yeast energizer.

Meanwhile, rehydrate the wine yeast.

Chill the must to a yeast-safe temperature and place in a sanitized one-gallon fermenter. Add the wine yeast and seal it.

Fermentation

Ferment for three weeks in the original fermenter.

Transfer to a secondary fermenter and age for six months.

I'll be back in six months (February 2018) to update you on the result.

09/09/2017: Transferred the mead off the sediment into a clean, sanitized secondary. Also tossed in some yeast nutrient to allow any remaining yeast to continue working. The mead is only slightly sweet at this point, and the chai flavors are detectable but subtle. It will be interesting to see where this is in a few months.

10/22/2017: Poured off a little of this for a taste test with a friend. We agreed that it's good and probably ready to be bottled, so I plan to do that later today.

Comments

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