Shadow Boxing Day: Keeping mellow with melomel

2026-02-04T08:59:36Z

As Boxing Day is to Christmas, so Shadow Boxing Day (February 3rd) is to Groundhog Day. Shadow Boxing Day is a day to get shit done that you've been putting off. [previously] Although I've been funemployed for five months, there's a lot of tasks that seem like a good idea, but I just don't get around to them. Like, why haven't I brewed anything yet? Shadow Boxing Day is close enough to Imbolc that making mead will count as celebration of Brigid the brewer.

We spent July 4th of last year bottling four carboys that had been sitting on the counter for years; the newest from 2021 and the oldest from 2018. Part of the problem was that home brewing is mostly "clean your kitchen" and then a little bit of "mix stuff in a pot." I would occasionally clean the kitchen on a Saturday, be too tired to brew on Sunday, and by the time there was another clear weekend the kitchen would be dirty again. Now that I've got counter space back and I can summon the energy to clean on something other than a free weekend, the zymurgy hobby is back on the table (so to speak).

Kelly and I made a honeymoon mead starting in late 2015. We were inspired by a mead shared at Dragonfest that year made from Brazilian wildflower honey, so we ordered a 60 pound bucket of the stuff. That's enough for three or four 5-gallon batches, and I've used it a few times since. But the results were coming out with a fairly harsh off-flavor, likely a result of fermenting at too high of a temperature: the yeast are stressed out, and you taste the result of them not doing their best work. I also wasn't getting inspired with new ideas for that particular honey, so it sat all lonely in a corner.

Honey is a pretty amazing substance. I can't think of many other foods that can sit half-empty in a closet for a decade and still be worth eating. But honey is anti-microbial, so the only challenge is that a lot of it had crystalized. Fortunately, our house has a nice low-tech way to get honey flowing: I left the bucket on our sun porch for a week, occasionally digging around with a spoon to shift the crystal clumps. The flavor is still nice: not too sweet and with a bit of a mysterious taste to match the dark amber color. I decided it could do well as a pomegranate mead, and found some unfiltered, unsweetened 100% pomegranate juice from Armenia at our local Middle Eastern shop. Having learned the yeast-fermentation-temperature lesson from my initial wine yeast brews, I picked up an English Ale yeast with an ideal temperature range of 64° to 79°F. Room temperature sits in the middle, and now that we've got a heat pump we might be able to keep the kitchen below 80° in the summer. My 2021 cyser with British Ale yeast turned out well, and was able to survive into the 12% alcohol range.

I normally take fairly precise measurements while home brewing, but not today. (Relax, don't worry, have a homebrew.) This melomel has "about 7 pounds" of honey, measured by lifting the honey bucket with an analog luggage scale, then lifting the empty bucket afterwards. I added "about a gallon" of warm water by filling a quart jar four times, then four liters of juice ('cause it's imported), then "about four liters" of water in those juice jars, so I could get the last bits of sediment into the brew. There's also somewhere between an extra 3 quarters to one whole cup of water from mixing the yeast and nutrient, plus rinsing the last of the must from the pot into the carboy. That gives "a little more than three gallons of liquid," plus the volume of honey. This should work perfectly; it's got plenty of surface area for primary fermentation in a 5-gallon glass carboy, and I can then rack it to a 3 gallon carboy for secondary, leaving behind what I expect to be rather a lot of trub: the pomegranate juice was quite cloudy.

The Internet has a bunch of opinions about fermentation vessels, with most commentators discouraging using a carboy for primary fermentation; the narrow neck increases the risk of blow-outs and reduces surface area for the initial aerobic phase. My theory is that "3.5 gallons in a 5 gallon carboy" solves both of those risks, and since I'm not planning to rack to secondary for two months I'd rather it sit in glass than plastic. Plus, I think this one will be fun to watch.

The pre-fermentation taste of the must is more subtle than I expected: a little sweetness at the front, followed by subtle pomegranate flavor—including a hint of the white pith—and then back to honey flavor at the finish. If you didn't know it was pomegranate, it might take a bit to place it. We'll see if this turns into a lovely dry melomel (just 12% potential alcohol), or if that fruit flavor disappears through primary. I got a couple jars of pure pomegranate syrup which I might add in secondary fermentation if necessary; that stuff is tart and tangy on pancakes.

I've got a couple other jugs of honey waiting for a round tuit now that I'm re-building my zymurgy reflexes. I got some wildflower honey from a Rocky Ford farmstand in 2024, and should probably start that fermenting now so we can add some fresh melons to secondary this summer, giving a better shot of retaining the cantaloupe flavor than starting with fruit chunks in the must. I also stopped for a hand-made "LOCAL HONEY" sign along highway 16 in the Arkansas Ozarks in 2022, not too far from Ben Hur and the Pedestal Rocks trailhead. I'm really not sure what to make with that one, so maybe I should start it as a traditional and see what the flavor suggests. I think there are also some Palisade peaches in the freezer waiting for a project…

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Coconut Porter

2018-02-05T04:30:53Z

When we were in Maui last October, Maui Brewing Company had a limited-edition Imperial Coconut Porter on tap that was blissfully delicious and at least twice as wonderful as their usual coconut porter. The ICP was so good that it tasted like coffee and I liked that about it. It also tasted like chocolate and coconut and several other things if you held it on your tongue long enough.

I'd been wanting to try brewing a dark beer this winter and after that heavenly taste I determined to make a coconut porter. I had no illusions that it would be as wonderful as the one from Maui, but anywhere in that ballpark should be tasty.

I poked around the Internet to get a sense of the ingredients that other folks used in coconut porters and then went to the friendly local homebrew store. I didn't have a planned recipe, so I spent probably ten minutes smelling tubs of dry malt and imagining their combined flavor. I ended up with a pound of chocolate malt (600–700°L), half a pound of 80°L crystal malt, half a pound of flaked oats, and four pounds of "golden light" liquid malt extract. (°L is a measure of color. I described the wort as "dark chocolate" and the final brew as "light black.") I stopped by Whole Foods for two pounds of flaked coconut and twelve ounces of honey which I managed to spill on the bulk food scale and then improperly label with a PLU code.

I'd been planning to add a pound of blackstrap molasses as well to add some more dark sugar to the mix. And when I was gathering ingredients for the wort I noticed that I'd had a jar of carob molasses sitting around that I bought over a year ago, figuring I'd use it in some kind of beer. It's dark and sweet, so in it goes!

After primary fermentation I racked the beer into a glass carboy and then dumped in roasted coconut flakes through a funnel. It turned out that 5 gallons of beer plus two pounds of flakes doesn't leave much headroom in a 5-gal carboy. In the first hour I watched the wet coconut push dangerously far up the neck of the glass. Remembering stories of exploding carboys when a brew gets up to the seal, I used the thief to draw out some liquid on the inside and coconut stuck to the outside. The next morning I woke to find chocolate-covered beer pushing up through the airlock and spilling onto the table. I was actually relieved by that state, since it didn't involve explosive glass shards. The mouth of a carboy is, unfortunately, narrower than a spoon, so the best tool I could find was a metal kebab skewer which I used to move some coconut mass around and open up air pathways.

Fortunately the secondary fermentation wasn't very active, so I didn't have to reengage with battle with the coconut monster until bottling. With about two gallons left in the carboy, we were suspicious that the syphon would get surrounded by coconut gunk and leave stranded beer. We poured from the carboy through a strainer into a pot, which was remarkably effective. We got a nice bowl of alcoholic coconut to much on, a fairly sediment-free final syphoning, and a carboy plastered with coconut:

The rest of bottling was mostly uneventful until small coconut flakes clogged up the bottling wand with about three bottles worth of beer left. I tried switching to the pinch-the-hose technique which is harder than it sounds and ended up with a decent amount of beer on the floor. (I don't think I've had a bottling evening that didn't end up with alcohol on the floor. Our dining room is blessed.) I did have the presence of mind to use the hose's position relative to the syphon point to stop and start flow, which was sufficient to fill a bottle or so.

Also, the plastic bottle tree I got from a coworker makes the bottle drying and at-hand-for-filling really slick:

Ingredient list:
5 gal Water
4 lbs CBW Golden Light liquid malt extract
1 lbs Crisp Malting chocolate malt 600-700L
8 oz flaked oats
8.5 oz Briess Malting caramel/crystal malt 80L
12 oz Colorado honey
1.3 lbs Plantation blackstrap unsulphured molasses
1.5 lbs Al Wadi Al Akhdar carob molasses
1 oz northern brewer hops
1 oz santiam hops
0.25 tsp Irish moss
2 lbs roasted flaked coconut
White Labs WLP80 cream ale yeast blend

The friend who helped me bottle declared that it tasted like "tart coconut." I'm very pleased with the coconut presence (though a pound would've made for less mess and still plenty of taste). There's a good dark malt flavor, though I don't taste a lot of chocolate, coffee, or other notes. It's not bitter yet also not very sweet.

Anon, anon! I pray you, remember the porter.

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From the Mind of Trevor Stone

Shadow Boxing Day: Keeping mellow with melomel

Coconut Porter