Hey ya'll from the desert

[heathenhawker]

I grew up in Seattle watching my dad making fruit wines in 5 gal carboys. He always used fruit he grew in his own garden: blackberry, strawberry, rhubarb, plum, etc... One year he offered me and the girl next door money per flower to pick dandylions so he could try making a wine out of that. We picked so many he regretted that decision. haha! Years later I watched my brother start making fruit wines and picked buckets of wild blackberries with him for it.
I'd thought about doing it myself but never really got around to it. It took me a few years and a couple moves, until I got here to southern Arizona, when I found out about mead... that finally put me over the edge and I decided I was going to try it. That was about 5 years ago, and I've tried a few different batches since then. Some came out really good and some were just plain nasty, but that's mostly my fault (I'm a casual cook, terrible at following directions)
My latest batch came from some honey that had been in a 5 gallon bucket in an old mormons basement for a minimum of 15 years until it aged to something that looked like molasses. Turned out fantastic!!

I've thought of trying beer, but I'm confident I'd mess it up. Which is o.k. since I like wine and mead anyway.


Anyways... that's my long intro.
Michelle

 

[troy2000]

I'm surprised no one ever replied to this thread. That aged honey sounds like a gold mine of flavor.... I've dug old honey out of walls while remodeling houses, that was pitch black and completely crystallized. I kept some from one job, and sweetened my coffee with it for years.

I grew up on The California side of the Colorado River, in the Palo Verde Valley (Blythe). It has two sets of canals: one to bring irrigation water, and another to drain off ground water and keep the place from turning into a marsh. One year the water district dredged the drain ditch near our house, and buried a couple of our bee hives. A couple of summers later, my brother Sherman and I decided to dig one out.

The bees had long since gone to meet their Maker, of course. But the hive was still full of honey, and some of it had fermented. We started scooping out honeycomb, and sucking/chewing on it. You talk about two wasted little boys...

We kept going back to to that hive for the rest of the summer. But after the hangover from the first day, we had enough sense to just take a little at a time for a treat.