Braggot

Braggot is a mead made with malt and honey, the malt makes it somewhat similar to beer or ale. To be called braggot not less than half of the fermantable sugars should come from honey, thus putting it in the mead category. This seems to be a style that not many mead makers make. However alot of beer brewers make a similar brew that probably more appropriately would be called honey beer or honey ale because they may use a lesser amount of honey and include hops. There are some (Fred Hardy comes too mind) that would argue that a true braggot should not contain hops.

For some time (a couple years) I have wanted to try a braggot but had no idea how to go about making one. I searched the net for recipes but found very few. The recipes I did find where mostly by beer makers and to me, having never made beer, they seemed complicated and confusing. Beer making is very different from the way I make mead, which is much more like wine making. I did make one failed attempt in 2002, the end result tasted terrible, and is the only batch I have ever dumped. I don't recall now what I did because I threw away my notes when I dumped the batch and I forgot about the idea of making a braggot for over a year.

Then I stumbled across a basic recipe that looked easy, using only liquid malt extract and honey. I decided to give this recipe a try. At about that same time I found two more recipes that looked interesting. These two were very similar to each other but different from the first and the authors claimed they were very good, So I decided to try one of these next to test the differences, more on this later.

The first sucesful braggot I made was the Easy Braggot listed on the My Mead page under 2004. This is a basic braggot that is easy to make with only 3 ingredients, 4 if you count the water.

I started by puting the can of malt extract in a sink full of hot water, this stuff is thick like honey and is easer to work with when warm. then put 2 gallons of water in a large pot too heat, when the water started boiling I opend the malt extract and added it, brought this back to boiling and reduced the heat and slowly boil for 30 minutes. This part seems really foreing to me because I don't boil my mead ingredients, but up to this point what I'm making is basically beer so I figured it best to folow beer making procedures.

After the 30 minute boil I put the pot in the sink full of cold water to cool the must, or wort as a beer maker would call it, and added the honey at about 150F. Then siphoned to a 6 gallon carboy with 2 gallons of cool water already in it, and topped up too 5 gallons. When the temperature was down to about 80F I added my active yeast starter, put on an air lock and put it with my other carboys. After one week I racked the batch to a clean 5 gallon carboy. When I make a mead without fruit it usualy dosen't get racked untill about 4 - 6 weeks after the start, but the usual way of making beer is to rack after 1 week then bottle after 2 more weeks. Honey takes longer to ferment so I kept it in the secondary carboy for 3 weeks before priming with 3/4 cup honey and bottling.

To a mead maker this seems like an insainly short time line. However with the low starting sg and the added nutrients in the malt extract, the fermentation appeared to be complete with an sg of about 1.003 and no activity. Malt contains some nonfermentable sugars hence the sg above 1.0. And as noted above beer is made on an even shorter schedule.

Lower alcohol brews typically don't need the long aging usually associated with mead so after about a month for carbonation to take place in the bottles this brew should be drinkable, naturally it should get even better with more aging. Now we have something to drink while waiting for that mead to age!

Armed with a (slightly) better understanding of the beer brewing process I decided to try a more complex braggot recipe.

Braggot #2
5 gallon batch:

I started by heating 2.5 gallons of water too 165F and steeping the grain (1lb. 20L crystal malt,crushed) at 160 - 165F for 20 minuets in a mesh bag from the brew shop. When removing the grain let it drain but do not squeeze the bag. Then heat the water too boiling and stir in the DME and add the hops and boil for 1 hour.

From what I understand the long boil is needed to extract the desired effect from the hops. When I added the hops the brew foamed up quite a bit so watch for boil over. Also note that I had planed to use .5 oz. hops but dumped in the whole 1 oz with out thinking. And while I'm on the subject of not thinking I'll mention I forgot to add the irish moss, This is a clarifier so it should not be a big deal. Maybe I shouldn't drink while trying to make a new batch for the first time.

After the boil I set the brew pot in the sink of cold water to cool and stirred in the honey when the temp was down to about 150F. Then siphoned too a six gallon carboy with 2 gallons of cool water already in it and toped up to 5 gallons, added ale yeast, air lock, and left it to do it's thing. This was about 11:00PM, the next morning the air lock was bubbling like mad.

The original recipe used equal amounts of honey and malt extract, 3 lb in one version and 5lb in another. I used more honey to get something less like beer and more like mead. The crystal malt is also a compromise between the two recipes, one used less of a dark grain and the other more of a light grain.

I can hardly wait to see how it turns out. The previous batch turned out very good after three weeks in the bottles, nice thick foamy head when poured, and tastes good to. It should get even better with a little aging.

Update - Feb. 10, 2005:

After a few weeks in the bottle this second braggot was very good and improving with aging. I like this one better than the first, there are only a few bottles left that I have been saving to see how it ages.

I plan to make another batch of this soon and tweak the recipe a little. I am going to try a lighter grain, 10L or 15L, and reduce the hops a little, .5 or .75 oz. And may fill a 1 gallon jug and age a few weeks in secondary with some medium toasted french oak chips.