Babalon’s Blood (black cherry) Mead for Samhain

Babalon’s Blood is a rich black cherry mead. Read on to follow along with the process as Sylvia and I make a splendid batch. This dark red mead is named for the goddess Babalon, a powerful deity of sexuality and power. One of my favorite chants by Sharon Knight honors three Great Goddesses, Inanna, Ishtar, and our mead’s namesake, Babalon. We sing this around the fire circle often. Babalon is perhaps the darkest of the three, and this mead honoring her is perfect for a Samhain ritual. More on Babalon later.

Eya Inanna, Hail to the Queen of Heaven
Whose spiced lips bring life everlasting
Hail to the Queen of Heaven

Eya Ishtar, Hail to the Queen of Heaven
Whose blade spills the blood of passion
Hail to the Queen of Heaven

Eya Babalon, Hail to the Queen of Heaven
Whose azure eyes drown all sorrows
Hail to the Queen of Heaven

from Songs for the Waning Year, released October 31, 2008, written by Sharon Knight

This post is the third of my posts about making mead with that marvelous mead-maker and pagan priestess, Sylvia. Back in March, we made a pomegranate mead, which I wrote about in this post. Then, at the beginning of June, we started two batches of mead on the same day. One was our Pomona’s Promise pear mead, which I posted about at the time. The other was a black cherry mead. The speed of brewing is so hard to predict! The pomegranate and pear meads are still in the carboy, creeping toward completion, but the cherry mead brewed swiftly. We declared it finished and bottled it recently. How did it turn out? Read on!

While we were setting out our ingredients, we reminisced about our lives as mead makers. I started brewing in the late 90s. Because I have a teacher’s soul, I immediately started offering workshops on brewing. Sylvia took my mead class at a Chamisa Local Council retreat in around 1998. We could place it in time because we remembered we were in Colorado and some sheepherders drove their herd through our camp during that summer retreat. A memorable moment. Baa. Sylvia got fired up about making mead right away. First she made lavender mead, then dandelion mead, both 2 gallon batches. Then she invested in some 5-gallon carboys and forged forward to make her first large batch, the debut of her black cherry mead.

Why cherry? The first time Sylvia made this, she had helped a friend on his farm. Together, they unload 2 tons of cherries from his truck. As a thank you, he gave her 25 pounds of cherries. She took them home and thought; “What am I going to do with all these cherries? Make mead, of course!” Thus was her first batch of Babalon’s Blood born. She put all the cherries in a primary fermenter, without pitting them, added honey and the other ingredients, and let it brew. Here’s her original recipe.

Some years later, Sylvia explored starting a commercial meadery. When she submitted her recipes to the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau, they required that the cherries to be pitted because of the controversy over whether the cyanide in the cherry pits could potentially be dangerous. So, she switched to using black cherry juice, and found it also made a wonderful mead. That’s what we used for this recipe. Here are the ingredients:

• 18 lbs. of raw wildflower honey from Honeyville in Durango, CO
• 12 quart bottles of organic black cherry juice
• 2 tablespoons acid blend
• 3 teaspoons yeast nutrient
• 1 vanilla bean
• I packet Lalvin D47 yeast (later we also added 1 packet Red Star Premier Blanc (champagne) yeast)

When I got up on brewing morning, I hydrated the yeast in a container of about a cup of warm water, and a quarter cup each of honey and table sugar. The yeast happily ate and multiplied for about six hours. My the time we pitched it, a vigorous colony was ready to get to work in our must.

Meanwhile, Sylvia and I prepared the must. (Must is brewer talk for the liquid that will ferment into mead.) We measured out 18 pounds of honey. Lots of honey, lots of cherry juice, so that the mead will turn out with a port character.

In my own individual brewing, I heat up the honey & water just enough to melt the honey. The advantage to this is that the more delicate flavors in the honey are preserved. (Besides, it’s quicker this way.) We were brewing by Sylvia’s method, so we brought the honey and a gallon of water to a boil and left it there for about 10 minutes, skimming off the foam. The advantage to Sylvia’s method is that it pasturizes the must and decreases the chances of bad beasties (bacteria, unwanted strains of yeast) wrecking the mead. You can also skim off more the the wax and bee’s knees that float to the top. Brewers who are reading this, I encourage you to weigh in about this in the comments section below. What do you do?

While the must was heating, we poured the juice into the primary fermenter. The primary fermenter was a white plastic food-grade bucket.

Remember, Sylvia’s original recipe was to use lots and lots of fresh cherries. I recommend that you use actual cherries. Yes, they can be expensive, but sometimes you can get a great deal on frozen cherries. These have the advantage of coming already pitted, just in case the whole arsenic thing worries you. Be sure to include peptic enzyme if you use whole fruit, so your batch isn’t tempted to try to become jelly.

We, however, were using juice. That’s easier. Sylvia and I both recommend using the R.W. Knudsen brand, because it’s very flavorful. As it happened, we had just 2 quart bottles of Knudsen juice in Sylvia’s pantry. A lightning trip to the store found that they were out of that brand, so we got 7 quarts of Simple Truth juice. It was a bit thinner in taste, so Sylvia got three more bottles of Knudsen’s the following week and threw those in, too. That brought us up to a grand total of 12 bottles of organic black cherry juice. By the way, be sure to avoid juice that has preservatives, as the preservatives are liable to kill your yeast. It’s kind of their job.

When the honey water was cooked and skimmed, we poured it into the primary fermenter. Oh, no! The fermenter cracked, leaking cherry must onto the floor! We grabbed a spare fermenter and transferred the must into it. We figure we lost about 3 cups of the precious fluid. But wait, perhaps this was a sacrifice to the mead’s namesake, the goddess Babalon.

Yes, it was an old bucket. After all, we’ve each been brewing for over twenty years. Or, perhaps, it’s because the force of Babalon is too strong to be contained. Babalon is a goddess that was part of Aleister Crowley’s occult system of Thelema. She seems to be based on the Mesopotamian goddess Ishtar. Crowley characterized her as dangerous and passionate, a sacred whore and source of power for sex magic. You can read more about Crowley’s relationship to Babalon on the Thelemepedia webiste. Here’s her sigil.

In Crowley’s Thoth Tarot deck the “Lust” card is an image of Babalon. Lust replaces the Strength card of the Rider Waite deck. This transformation is consistent with Crowley’s worldview. An early proponent of ‘free love’, Crowley had a big influence on the sex-positive pathway that Wicca has taken in the past century.

Sylvia said, “I named this mead after Babalon because I had been working through Crowley’s Enochian Ethers at that time. There’s a line in several of the airs that were a powerful image for me, ‘I rest in the arms of Our Lady Babalon’. She’s definitely a dark goddess. This mead is a tribute to the power and magic that is in the Goddess’ blood. I think this is my most powerfully magical mead. I make it especially for Samhain. It’s the mead I’ve made over and over, and the only one I’ve made over and over. This is about the 7^th time.”

After Babalon broke our bucket, she settled down, and the must started aerobic fermentation. We racked into a glass carboy after one week in the primary. Anaerobic fermentation was a tetch sluggish, so we racked again a month later and added Champagne yeast. That sure got things rocking!

The batch finished in mid-September, after a little over 4 months. We prepared to bottle. We washed two cases worth of bottles. (As dedicated meadmakers, we both have cases of wine bottles that get filled with mead, emptied enjoyably, then filled again.) We used One Step oxygen cleaner to sterilize the bottles and left them to dry in this nifty bottle-drying rack. Of course, we taste-tested the Babalon’s Blood mead and decided it was ready. More than ready–it was delicious.

Next, we bottled the mead using Sylvia’s Ferrari corker. I always enjoy driving the Ferrari! The corks were synthetic corks from the local brewshop. Sometimes we use corks made of real cork, but then you have to store the bottles on their sides so the corks don’t dry out and let in oxygen. Our final count was 2 cases of mead.

We were both very pleased with the way this batch came out. The very first time Sylvia made it, the batch came out very portlike, thick and wonderful, and at 22% alcohol. She said it was creamy and sweet in a complex way. Sylvia has made it many times since, and it is always a little different, depending on sweetness of juice or cherries, and the honey itself. (She says the honey in some years is sweeter than in other years.) It always comes out 18-22%. According to our measurements with the hydrometer, this batch is at 20.5% alcohol. It is so, so good–rich, earthy, and sweet. Goddess blessed!

I brought a bottle of this mead to a Yeast Herder’s Gatherum. That’s a gathering of people who herd yeast: mead makers, beer brewers, and wine makers. This gatherum took place at a Mabon festival in New Mexico. (I wrote previously about our main ritual in this post.) I presented the mead and my brewing friends considered it carefully. The nose, the mouth, the flavor, the appearance.

It was a hit! If my friends liked it, I bet yours, would, too. I hope you’ll try out this recipe and make your own batch of Babalon’s Blood mead. It’s perfect for a Samhain ritual. I’ll be using it in my Samhain ritual later this month. My magic will be all the deeper for including mead made with intent, by friends, for friends. Happy Samhaintide!

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