I was recently given some homemade chokecherry honey syrup and frankly it’s just not very good. The taste is just a bit weird for me. There is about 56 oz of the stuff and I thought it might make a good mead. Any thoughts about how to approach this since I have very little mead-making experience?
Thanks,
Sou
I suspect that if the syrup doesn’t taste very good a mead made with it wouldn’t taste very good either. But if your only investment is a packet of yeast and maybe some nutrients try it.
56 oz you say? is that volume or weight? if volume your talking about 2.6 lbs of syrup. so you could do a reasonable 1 gallon sized batch by diluting to 1 gallon, adding yeast and nutrients and waiting.
you might want to dilute the syrup to get a better idea of the flavour in smaller concentrations. perhaps it will be good at 1 part syrup to 10 parts water or similar in which case you could up your batch size and suplement with more honey.
just thinkin gout loud here.
A little bit of it would be nice in a sweet mead. Moderate use of the stuff is the key though.
A touch of it in a sweeter style of stout would also work very well.
Don’t worry about using it all at once…it should last for years and not go bad. The sourness of the stuff calls for balancing it with lots of sugar, so it’s best used lightly in sweet things.
If you don’t like it and don’t use it, send it to me!!!
;D
They are called ‘choke’ cherry’s for a reason. Do you know if it is chokecherry honey, chokecherry syrup, or chokecherry syrup with honey, or something else?
It’s a mix of a chokecherry syrup and honey.
It already is incredibly sweet so the tart character is pretty well overwhelmed. As for the flavour making for a bad mead, I guess I oversimplified. It’s not something I want to eat on my pancakes/waffles but its flavour could be good in the right application such as a mead or (thanks for the idea) a lightly hopped stout.
Yeah I can see it not being good on pancakes. The tartness will be more evident if you brew with it as much of the sugar will ferment out. I think it might be really good in that case. mead or stout. Although I am not a huge fruit stout fan I won’t be drinking it so no worries!
I’ve had tart cherry belgian ales that were great too.
I like it ok on French Toast…just FWIW ya might try that.