phil where do you get your honey from? have you tried various sources?
Many months ago I tested every raw honey sold in my local area, plus others I ordered (including most of the honeys recommended in this forum), for taste and health effects, seeking the world's best (even though I have a lower tolerance for carbs than most people in the world, and even after many failures with various highly-touted honeys, I had a gut feeling that I would find a honey I could tolerate and possibly even benefit from, which proved true, oddly enough), from my perspective, of course. I found Really Raw Fermented honey to be by far the best for both my tastes and health of all the honeys I tried--even better than highly touted dark honeycomb, which I did find to taste good, but didn't provide me with any noticeable health benefits. So when I decided to try making mead, it was a natural choice, though I had tried the unfermented version and a local raw crystallized honey before that. I thought that starting with a fermented honey might make it easier to ferment without adding yeast, but that was not the case.
Honey doesn't kill all microbiota, just the bad ones. Healthy yeasts and bacteria apparently thrive in raw honey, which is apparently one thing that makes it such a healing food. Heating honey apparently diminishes this and enables pathogenic bacteria to more easily grow in it, which is apparently why people warn against feeding infants honey--because all they know is heated honey (so sad
). My experience is that the truth of the natural world tends to be pretty much the opposite of most common assumptions. One could probably fare pretty well by doing nearly the opposite of the common wisdom in just about everything, as long as one does it within a natural, raw Paleo context. Interestingly, even in this forum I've tended to find that the more adamant and dogmatic people are about something, the less likely it is to be true (though this doesn't always hold). Some of the most godawful foods I've tried were touted as ambrosia here. My experience tends to come pretty close to Tyler's and Lex Rooker's when it comes to taste, health effects, etc. (though I don't get super-nauseas or vomit when I eat cooked meats like Tyler reports, and I hope that fate doesn't await me in the future
).
Using champagne yeast that the home brewer supply lady selected for me, which is the most common type of yeast used with mead, appears to be working, but time will tell. There are also true mead (honey) yeasts, which presumably would be best suited to honey. I haven't heard of anyone using dairy yeasts like kefir grains or kombucha tea yeasts in honey before. Seems like they would be better suited to what they are designed for. No way I'm putting whey in my priceless honey, sorry. I don't even like whey cheese (such as feta) very much.
It's fascinating how little is known about fermented honey and traditional mead around the modern world, despite their being some of the world's tastiest and healthiest foods. This is one reason why it's so important to try to preserve at least some of the traditional hunter-gatherer cultures. One doesn't have to like foreigners or foreign cultures to have a reason to preserve traditional knowledge via preserving traditional culture.
'Sowee.'
Are you callin' pigs, Dorothy?
Even if not, I'm still lovin' it.
Topic: Raw Alcoholic Beverages (Read 17119 times)