Brewing has come to an end…boo-hoo!  After completion of the Resurrection Metheglin there was one last brew bucket to be used and alas, this is what has happened, the final fermentation:  Black Pepper Beef Jerky and Chilli Metheglin.

The idea for this unusual mead had its inception from reading an old article on Cock Ale.  Apparently, an old, parboiled cock (a rooster, you sick folk ;-P) that has been flayed, stamped in a stone mortar and put in a sack with other aromatic goodies can be steeped into ale to add just a little bit more body!  Well, with a leap of tangential thinking, derailment and frank thought disorder, I took Cock Ale and got…ta-da…Beef Jerky Mead with Chilli!

Extrapolating (or intrapolating or just plain guesstimating) from the original recipe of one cock for 10 gallons of ale…and making some assumptions as to the size of your average Belizean cock; and, also, considering the difference in flavour between fowl and beef…we settled on 250g of beef jerky for five gallons of mead.

This is the amount of chilli pepper we used:

…a nice, wild hybrid of jalapeno (sorry, no tilde) and bird pepper that turns purple before red.

I aimed for a slightly higher strength of alcohol than usual (6-7% alcohol) in order to better hold the expected heaviness from the beef and chilli; which in this case, was achieved with four and a half “quarts” of Belizean Rainforest Honey…

The beef jerky was simmered with half the chilli for about an hour without the honey, making a nice and spicy beef broth.  After which, the honey was added and brought to the boil for a second before cooling and pouring into the brew bucket.  The yeast used was my standard “evolving” lager yeast.

Let’s see how it turns out!

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