A Pyment (grape wine mead) made with a Cabernet Sauvignon wine kit.
Originally Posted: Aug. 8, 2020
Table of Contents
Quick Specs
- ABV: ~12%
- Taste Profile: like a dry red wine
- Time: 3 months
- Yield: 30 bottles
Intro
Like apple cyser mead, Pyment may have played a transitional role in a regional brewing tradition. Simply put, Pyment is a grape mead. It starts as a standard grape wine must to which honey is added as an adjunct fermentable sugar. It is often confused with the drink Hippocras, which is grape wine with honey mixed in after fermentation for flavor and perceived medical benefits.
Brief History
It is often repeated by brewing historians that mead was the world’s oldest alcoholic drink. Raw honey already contains everything needed for fermentation; a mixture of wild yeast and bacteria find their way into the honey, inadvertently transported from the surface of sugar-containing flowers and plants to the hive by the honeybee. The reason that honey keeps so long without rotting or fermenting is its hygroscopic nature—it simply doesn’t have enough water content to promote microbial action like fermentation.
Ancient Greek writers claimed that mead—possibly the inspiration for the ambrosia and nectar the gods sustained themselves on—was the preferred drink during the “Greek Golden Age” in prehistory. Archaeological evidence of mead-containing vessels have been discovered dating back thousands of years, and Greece is no exception.
However, as the neighboring Phoenicians began creating the largest maritime trade empire the world had seen up until then, they began to spread their grape wine culture throughout the Mediterranean (discussed in Ancient Brews: Rediscovered and Recreated by Patrick E. McGovern). One way in which they facilitated trade throughout the Mediterranean was to convert the locals from drinking their own local brews and hybrid grogs to drinking wine made from grapes. Wine became a standard trade commodity—almost a currency in its own right—and vineyards were planted wherever the Phoenicians built a trading port.
Like the rest of the late Bronze Age Mediterranean, Greece made the switch from the older and more expensive honey-based beverages to the relatively cheaper and more numerous grape.
Ingredients
Note: While you can make your base wine the old-fashioned way by crushing grapes, it takes somewhere around 95 lbs. of grapes to produce roughly 5 gallons of wine. Alternatively, there are a number of grape wine kits to be found on the internet. I had a good experience with the Wild Grapes brand California Cabernet Sauvignon kit I used; it had the fastest turnaround I’ve seen in a mead to date.
- Wild Grapes brand California Cabernet Sauvignon kit
- Includes wine must concentrate, oak dust, bentonite clay
- Next time I do this, I will ignore the kit instructions saying to add the oak dust and bentonite at the very beginning. I prefer oak cubes because their volume adds complexity, and using fining agents like bentonite makes more sense at the end of fermentation.
- 5 lbs. Wildflower Honey
- This amount may vary. When I took an initial SG reading of the wine kit on its own, it stood to make a somewhat weak wine. Adding 5 lbs. got the SG up strong enough to make a ~12% wine.
- Lalvin EC-1118 yeast
- D-47 may be my favorite for fruit meads in general, but EC-1118 is quicker.
- Spring water
- Go-Ferm
Equipment
- Sanitizer
- Fermenter
- Airlock and stopper
- Sous vide circulator (optional, for warming honey)
Instructions
- Optional: Warm the honey containers to 94°F to ease pouring. This will help you get as much honey out of the containers as possible.
- Sanitize all your equipment: Fermenter, airlock/bung, and pots and cooking implements that will touch your mead. I like to fill one whole side of my sink with Star-San and soak anything that will fit. This way I can also pour the sanitizer solution into fermenters or other containers using a measuring cup as needed.
- Mix wine kit ingredients (mainly water and grape must concentrate) per kit instructions. However, for the Wild Grapes brand in particular I’ll add oak and bentonite at the end next time. Take a specific gravity reading of your diluted mix before choosing how much honey you want to add.
- Once honey is warmed up, pour it into the wine must. Depending on how much honey you choose to add, you may want to step-feed the honey over a week or two in order to be kind to the yeast.
Variations
When I first heard about Pyment, my mind immediately imagined a red wine mead. So far I’ve only done the Cabernet Sauvignon kit (it’s one of my favorite wines besides Chianti) as a pyment, but I’m curious how a white wine pyment would taste. Perhaps next time I’ll try a Chardonnay kit for a white pyment, or a Sangiovese kit (Chianti is a blend and contains 70% Sangiovese).
Tips & Tricks
As stated before, although the kit instructions told me to add the oak dust and bentonite right at the beginning, I think it makes a lot more sense to add both after fermentation has completed. Oak cubes or oak spirals will add a lot more complexity to wine than oak dust or oak chips.
You won’t be able to see any light shine through this wine while it’s in its fermenter, so it can be difficult to tell if it’s clarified sufficiently. However, when I added an extra dose of bentonite at the end of fermentation, I noticed a thick layer of sediment form over the next two days. The wine had previously clogged the coarsest pads of my filtration system, but after that second round of bentonite it went through the filters just fine.
Culinary Uses
This mead was an excellent addition to a Pyment Steak Marinade I whipped up. The marinade consisted of only 5 main ingredients (not counting salt and pepper):
- Pyment
- Garlic (I used homemade lacto-fermented garlic)
- Fresh rosemary
- Miso paste
- Balsamic vinegar
- Salt & pepper to taste
