Pomona’s Promise Pear Mead

Today I had the pleasure of inventing a new recipe for mead with Sylvia, mead mistress extraordinaire. She had a lot of gallon bags of pears in her freezer; gifts from friends with pear trees who know that brewers are always happy to accept ingredients for mead. (Brewers who have chest freezers, anyway.)

As soon as I woke up this morning, I prepared our yeast. I had chosen Lalvin D47 at Victor’s Home Brew shop yesterday. I hydrated one packet in a pint of warm honey & sugar water. Sylvia usually uses Champagne yeast and goes for a dry mead, but I asked if this pear mead could be in the semi-sweet to semi-dry range and Sylvia agreed to humor me. So, D47 it is. It’s a favored yeast of the Yeast Herders, my beloved brewing community at Dragonfest pagan festival. One of my favorite songs that I’ve ever written is Bless Our Mead: The Yeast Herders’ Anthem. It’s on our second album, Crow Magic. It’s track 24, the one with the fanfare on kazoos. (Well, they sound like bees buzzing. It made sense to us.)

We got all the pears out and found that there were 10 pounds, 11 oz. of Asian pears. I happen to love the flavor of Asian pears, so this was good news.

There were also 12 pounds, 5 oz. of Mystery Pears. Some were in bags with no label. Others were from our friend Kathryn’s pear tree. When I texted her to ask what kind of pears they are, she said, “neglected pears”. (The tree came with her house and it just keeps on keeping on. Anonymously.) All the pears, elite and common, were put in the 6 gallon primary fermenter (white plastic bucket) to start thawing. Then we had Mimosas. After all, it was brunch hour on a Sunday morning.

So, dear reader, we made this mead from:

23 pounds of pears of various pedigree
16.5 pounds of the raw wildflower honey that I recently picked up at Honeyville in Durango, CO
1 vanilla bean to set flavor
I packet Lalvin D47 yeast
2 tablespoons peptic enzyme

I thought we might want more vanilla, but Sylvia said one bean would be best. She thought more beans would give this mead a distinct vanilla taste, but a single bean would just bring out the fruit flavor. That way, the pear flavor won’t get lost to the alcohol. So that’s what we did.

We melted the honey in a gallon of water and stirred it from time to time to keep it from burning. While the honey was heating up, we brainstormed about what to call the mead. We’d been thinking of it as a spring mead, but the interwebs let us know pear harvest season is August to October in the Northern Hemisphere. Then we wondered whether there were any goddesses of pears. Another internet search brought up a blog called Deaf Pagan’s Crossroads with information on Goddesses associated with pears. (Good post—I recommend it.) Listed were Aphrodite, Hera and Pomona. Hmm, Pomona sounds good with Pear! We really liked the image on the blog of Pomona—it’s in the same Art Deco style as many of Sylvia’s labels. She sounded perfect for our mead, as she is a Goddess of fruit trees. Sylvia came up with the name “Pomona’s Promise Pear Mead”. It will promise sweetness on the tongue, and in life, too.

By then the must (honey water) came to a boil and we turned off the heat at the first vigorous roll. Sylvia skimmed off the froth. Then we added the must to the primary fermenter bucket full of frozen pears. We added water to come up to 6 gallons, and futzed with it to get the mixture to a temperature that the yeast would find a comfortable new home.

Once the temperature stabilized, we took our hydrometer reading. It was 1.150 at 70 degrees. Correcting for temperature, our initial specific gravity reading is 1.151. Some months from now, when the mead is all done, we’ll test again and get an estimate of its alcohol level. Sylvia likes to do it this scientific way. I usually don’t worry about the hydrometer, I just estimate alcohol level by how friendly the mead makes me.

Then Sylvia and I invoked Pomona to bless the mead We asked this goddess of fecundity and summer fruits to bless our mead, which is dedicated to her. We called on her to fulfill this promise: that those who will someday drink this mead will enjoy a harvest of bounty and contentment. It was a juicy invocation. Sylvia got goosebumps so she knows Pomona was with us.

Our mead blessing ritual complete, I pitched in the happily frothing D47 yeast. Sylvia stirred it into the glurp of honey and pears, giving it some extra oxygen for its aerobic stage of fermentation.

Wow, that is one full primary fermenter! Sylvia plans to let it work in the primary for 12 days, then pull out the mesh bag of pears. It will have disintegrated to mostly skins by then. Removing the bag should bring the volume down to a point where the fluid can be racked into a 5 or 6 gallon carboy.

The initial flavor is very sweet, with a strong pear character, no surprise with 23 pounds of fruit. I think this will be a good one. Maybe I’ll write a song for Pomona. Stay tuned!

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