--- "Linda Carter" > wrote: >I'm still getting up the courage to brew my first mead. >A friend of mine asked me for a blue mead, because >she's planning on putting together some sort of >something for the SCA, I think. Does anyone know >of any fruits that would brew up a brilliant sapphire melomel? >Perhaps blueberry or would that be too red? >I really don't want to use food coloring. > >-Linda Carter- Blueberries will produce a very dark red colour with a hint of blue making the end result purple-ish. Try sqishing a few berries between your fingers and look at the stains on your skin. Thats roughly the color the brew will have. It's tasty but not 'brilliant sapphire' blue. I'm not sure if it will give a good result if any at all since I haven't tried it but one thing that strikes me is the following: Letting the skins of blueberries soak in alcohol to extract the color from them (same technique as when making red wine). What I don't know is if there's a difference between the color extracted from the skin vs that from the 'pulp' of the berry. The skins might need some light washing to be as clean as possible. soak the skins for a few days in say 30-40% alcohol and mix it in with the mead after straining out the skins. Add the alcohol/color mixture to the mead until the desired color. Another way would be to put the skins into your fermenting bin and strain them out after a week or so. This would avoid raising the alcohol level of the mead too much from adding some alcohol/color-mixture. To avoid playing peek-a-boo with the brew just add some fermenting mead and skins to a 0,5l PET bottle and you'll see how the color develops but try to get the liquid/skin ratio as close as possible to the one in your larger bin for the best result. Well, that's as far as my 2 cents will get me... /Angus MacIomhair == There comes a time in every man's life when he must feel tempted to spit in his hands, hoist the black flag and begin slitting throats. --H.L. Mencken _____________________________________________________________ Get your own mando cool and totally free email@iamawitch.com address at http://freemail.iamawitch.com today! ------------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe from this list, send email to majordomo@pbm.com containing the words "unsubscribe hist-brewing" (or unsubscribe hist-brewing-digest, if you get the digest.) To contact a human about problems, send mail to owner-hist-brewing@pbm.com