Sea Buckthorn.

[peds]

Well it's mead, so it's not exactly bone dry for a start. 

 

Also, I find the tangy berries themselves amazingly palatable, in the same way as Haribo Tangfastic or something. The mead seen above is delicious, but needs about ten times as much berry juice in it to be a real wow. I forget what quantity of berries made each bottle of mead, but obviously harvesting them is a total bitch, and I probably tried to stretch them too far. 

 

Some home brews you make once and don't bother with again (watermelon wine? Ehh...), some you come back to time and time again (blackcurrant wine, hello!). I'll be making sea buckthorn mead again, 100%, and with much more berry juice.

 

Edit:

I should add, they were berries from a cultivar intended for decent fruit. Puckeringly sour, but soft and juicy, and not at all drying or astringent like a sloe. I cannot recall the name of the cultivar, but I can find out again if you want. 

Edited October 3, 2023 by peds

[sime42]

19 hours ago, peds said:

Well it's mead, so it's not exactly bone dry for a start. 

 

Also, I find the tangy berries themselves amazingly palatable, in the same way as Haribo Tangfastic or something. The mead seen above is delicious, but needs about ten times as much berry juice in it to be a real wow. I forget what quantity of berries made each bottle of mead, but obviously harvesting them is a total bitch, and I probably tried to stretch them too far. 

 

Some home brews you make once and don't bother with again (watermelon wine? Ehh...), some you come back to time and time again (blackcurrant wine, hello!). I'll be making sea buckthorn mead again, 100%, and with much more berry juice.

 

Edit:

I should add, they were berries from a cultivar intended for decent fruit. Puckeringly sour, but soft and juicy, and not at all drying or astringent like a sloe. I cannot recall the name of the cultivar, but I can find out again if you want. 

 

Yes please to the cultivar name. I'll be interested to try that growing and using that. Puckeringly sour we can deal with.

I've done a fair bit of home brewing in the past, though never mead. What's the rough proportions of honey/water/sea buckthorn juice?

[Paul in the woods]

21 hours ago, peds said:

Well it's mead, so it's not exactly bone dry for a start. 

Well, Melomel. Do you have any other favourite mead, or honey and fruit/herb recipies as I've got loads of honey but not overly fond of mead.

 

I've grown sea buckthorn from seed and the plants are doing very well in my woodland apart from never showing any signs of flowering, some must be 15' as well and over 10 years old.

[Macpherson]

On 03/10/2023 at 17:51, sime42 said:

horrendously sour/bitter/dry/astringent

 

Ime this is what you want in any base fruit or seed, it's very often the fingerprint of a substance called Amygdalin which is found in many seeds and berries that haven't  been bred / cultivated to suit today's sweet tastes, this substance has been vilified for decades in order to prevent folk from consuming it.

 

When I process wild berries I usually blitz them in order to release the contents of the seeds into the brew.. 

' an apple a day ' and all that, as long as you eat the seeds...

 

If you can get through the first few pages of google misinformation and warnings there's a lot to be learned on this subject, cheers.

 

 

[coppice cutter]

Winched back up in to place with a couple of heavy duty ratchet straps, then staked it which will hopefully keep it secured until something gets the berries.

 

Seems very shallow rooted so when the berries are gone I'll reduce the height of it a bit and probably do the same with the rest from now on to prevent re-occurrence.

 

Took a few quick snaps with my phone so those interested could see the scale and quantity of berries. It's a cheap phone so the pics aren't great but hopefully you'll get the idea.

 

[coppice cutter]

On 03/10/2023 at 16:51, Stephen Blair said:

, the pain from the jabs, the puss in the jab holes

Was working at it yesterday and a few of those have developed on my hands today, just minor scratches, totally insignificant at the time, and now they're stinging like buggery.

 

Never had the like before.

 

Against that, I thought the smell of the berries was lovely, very unique!

[sime42]

4 hours ago, coppice cutter said:

Winched back up in to place with a couple of heavy duty ratchet straps, then staked it which will hopefully keep it secured until something gets the berries.

 

Seems very shallow rooted so when the berries are gone I'll reduce the height of it a bit and probably do the same with the rest from now on to prevent re-occurrence.

 

Took a few quick snaps with my phone so those interested could see the scale and quantity of berries. It's a cheap phone so the pics aren't great but hopefully you'll get the idea.

 

 

Thanks. That bugger is certainly loaded with fruit. It's like the tree has aimed to use every available inch of space along the branches.

 

I wonder if it's shallow rooting habit is due to its having evolved to grow in sand dunes on the coast. Probably no advantage to being deep rooted in that situation.

[coppice cutter]

6 hours ago, sime42 said:

 

Thanks. That bugger is certainly loaded with fruit. It's like the tree has aimed to use every available inch of space along the branches.

 

I wonder if it's shallow rooting habit is due to its having evolved to grow in sand dunes on the coast. Probably no advantage to being deep rooted in that situation.

Must be something like that going on with it.

 

The ground it's in is very dry but that's just because it's very free draining, there's a decent depth of loam on top which it could be rooting much deeper down in to than what it is, so must just be in it's nature.

 

Probably best keep them height limited from now on.

 

Will make the berries a lot easier got when I do get around to doing something with them anyway.

[peds]

On 04/10/2023 at 17:54, Paul in the woods said:

Well, Melomel. Do you have any other favourite mead, or honey and fruit/herb recipies as I've got loads of honey but not overly fond of mead.

 

I've grown sea buckthorn from seed and the plants are doing very well in my woodland apart from never showing any signs of flowering, some must be 15' as well and over 10 years old.

 

Mead, melomel, metheglin, whatever. I don't think it's an important distinction, personally. If a drink uses honey as the primary fermentable sugar, I'm calling it mead. It's like the Americans getting their pants in a bunch insisting that a grilled cheese be called a melt instead if there's anything more than cheese in it. It doesn't clarify anything significant. 

 

I've made mead thrice, once many years ago which was cheap shop-bought honey and black tea for tannin, which didn't age for long enough and tasted bland and doughy. 

Then in 2020 I made a batch of pure with my own bees' harvest, and a batch of the buckthorn. Three years later they are both delicious, but I intend to hold off as long as possible before opening the next bottles of either, because people say that aging mead for a good few years really does pay dividends.

 

Unless I can be certain that the nectar used is from one main source, I think I would always do a fruit base from now on and just use the honey as the fuel for fermentation. But I'd love to do things like gorse mead, ivy mead, heather mead, etc., maybe even hopped with additional flowers as well as the single source honey. But it seems like a hell of a lot of faff, to be honest.

[peds]

On 04/10/2023 at 15:58, sime42 said:

 

Yes please to the cultivar name. I'll be interested to try that growing and using that. Puckeringly sour we can deal with.

I've done a fair bit of home brewing in the past, though never mead. What's the rough proportions of honey/water/sea buckthorn juice?

 

Cultivars:

 

Proportions, I honestly couldn't tell you, as for two gallons I used the honey washed out with boiling water from the bottom of my frame spinner, the jam pan I was using to hold it before bottling, the funnel, sieve, and wax cappings; plus a couple of jars for good measure. And there was probably about 1.6kg of berries in the buckthorn one, not sure what quantity of juice that yielded.