Hi I’m new here and new to home brew only have 3 brews. I’m here asking about a brew the my dad is asking me to do. He wants a peach mead and going down the rabbit hole of how to bring the peach flavor out I saw citrus fruit and clover helps with the flavor. I was thinking about using clover honey and peach puree for the primary fermentation and adding blood orange for secondary fermentation some advice would be awesome. It will be a 3 gal brew i was thinking about 3 lbs. of honey, 3 lbs. of peach puree and the sample size of Oregon fruit blood orange
I like the idea of using clover honey. Don’t know if I would suggest or recommend blood orange, that could be too sour. I would swap that out with more honey. And I would feel compelled to supplement the real peach puree with extract on top of it – I know it’s “cheating” but to me, artificial peach tastes more like peach than peach does. I’d go easy on it, though – if a small bottle says it’s good for X number of gallons, I would only use perhaps 1/3 to 1/2 as much as the bottle recommends. This will allow the real peach to shine. Finally… I would also consider supplementing with ginger, as in my opinion, ginger goes together super well with peach. This of course is completely optional. I don’t know how much I would use. Not much, as I wouldn’t want it to overpower. I’d probably get fresh ginger, peel it and add just 3 or 4 little slices or dice of it per gallon, straight into the fermenter, could be interesting.
I just made a second one gallon batch of a peach mead that my friends love. Most people will tell you that they expect the flavor of a ripe juicy peach when they drink a peach mead. This accomplishes that. I’m convinced that the only way to achieve this is by adding peaches in primary.
I do up to five ripe peaches in primary, pitted and cut into 16ths. I don’t know what that weighs. I’m kind of going by how much headspace I have in my Big Mouth Bubbler.
2.5 pounds of honey (I use Brazilian Pepper)
Water to one gallon
Peaches
1 tsp Fermaid O (front-loaded)
Lellemand Voss Kveik (fermented at 95° F)
Primary Fermentation takes about 6 days. Even with some generous headspace, this sent must into the airlock a couple of times.
I rack it to secondary, pasteurize it, and let it sit for 2 weeks.
I backsweeten to taste and let it sit another week.
Bottle. I’ve found it never really clears, even after three rackings, but I have not cold crashed it.
This last batch was just over 8% ABV, but probably higher with the peach sugars.
I have used apricots and mango to support peach meads, both seem to work well. Peaches alone are a sweet forward tasting fruit and removing the sugars through fermentation takes up most of the peach flavour. If you are going with only peaches then the more the better, there is also option of some back sweetening before bottling to enhance the flavour. With all my fruit meads I use 1-1 1/2 lb of fruit per 1 lb of honey while targeting pH of 3.5 (pH of 3.0-3.9 depending on the fruit) and this gives a good fruit forward flavour profile.
I have used this approach with blueberry mead one time and thought it was a little more fruit forward than fruit only in primary, but I did not have a control blueberry of just primary fruit to compare. That said, I have read commercial mead makers say that primary and secondary is the way to go for fruit forward results.