Mesquite Bean Mead

[Jericurl]

I collected 8 gallons of dried beans this year. Then I weighed out 3 lbs beans per gallon of water and boiled for approx an hour, then let steep before straining liquid. I was mainly going by how my family and friends make the juice for jelly. 3 gallons of liquid has been placed in the deep freeze until ready for use.

Well, now I've read up on it a bit more and everything says to not boil, or boil for only 15 minutes or so because it brings out the tannins. We did taste the liquid and it wasn't bitter or particularly tannic, but I'm now concerned that this will pose a problem in my finished mead.
I've probably got about 3 lbs of beans left that I plan on roasting and making into a thick syrup to use for backsweetening.

I've also read that adding bentonite clay will strip out a lot of tannin from a wine or mead.

Anyone have experience here?

eta: Also, I have read the thread here for mesquite bean wine.

 

[Mismost]

Jericurl, do you ever make anything mundane like regular beer or grape based wines?

At this point, it is what is...don't stop now! We want to hear how this turns out. As I recall, we got left hanging on the mesquite wine thread.

My two cents, which is worth just that....I would think you would want to use green mesquite beans, before they dried out. My only real experience was about 50 years ago in Boy Scouts and we pounded dry beans into flour and made flat bread. As I recall, it beat sucking on dry rocks, but not by very much! Great for smoking briskets!

 

[Jericurl]

Jericurl, do you ever make anything mundane like regular beer or grape based wines?

Have you seen the instructions for making beer?! We got a kit in a couple of years ago...it was two pages worth of instructions! Ain't nobody got time for that!
It's still sitting around here somewhere. And be patient....grape wine making is coming...I'm waiting on a bigger house...and a press.

I will make sure to keep everyone updated on the process.

 

[Jericurl]

Next time I think I'll shoot for twice as much.

 

[Wisconsin]

Ok if I steal your sig and maybe change it to something like.... "I always forget to edit for grammar, clarity, and misspellings. Always"..

 

[Mismost]

Jericurl....Have you seen the instructions for making beer?! We got a kit in a couple of years ago...it was two pages worth of instructions! Ain't nobody got time for that!

Wine goes in the bucket faster....beer gets in the bottle faster...niether are hard to do. I've made some pretty good beers from the pre-hopped Muntons and Cooper can kits. Add a little orange peel, a pound of this, a dash of one of your extracts...three weeks in a bucket and bottle it up...three weeks later you drink beer. My current beer start to cleaned up was about 2 hours. From wine making, you already know most of the process...sanitation, racking, bottling. It can be as simple as a dump cake!

It takes lots of beer to make good wine...or so I'm told.

 

[Jericurl]

I started this on 12-06-16.


Mesquite Bean Mead

2.5 gallons juice from boiling mesquite beans, frozen then thawed
1 gallon mesquite honey
.5 gallon mesquite bean syrup
water to 5 gallons
1 T pectic enzyme
D47 yeast

I'm doing a bit of a modified version of TiOSNA (mainly because I ordered Fermaid K, but forgot about ordering DAP, plus didn't realize I was out of GoFerm). More information about that can be found here: http://www.meadmaderight.com/tiosna--inorganic-.html

It's fairly cold in the house and we are having our first cold snap. Lows will be in the 20s/highs in the 30s. Fermentation was a bit sluggish so I put my heating pad around the carboy last night, just to give it a little boost and get it rocking and rolling. It turns off automatically after a bit so I wasn't worried about my temperatures for D47 getting too high. When I got up this morning the carboy was chugging away.

I will add bentonite on the 3rd day of fermentation.

This will be a 5 gallon batch.
Once I rack, I still have a 1/2 gallon of mesquite bean syrup (same as the juice, just boiled down to a thicker more potent flavor). I'm hoping I don't have to use much of it for top offs, etc, because I have another idea I'd like to try on a test batch with it.