Mead smells...

[TimT]

(Cross-posted in Got Mead)

That smell mead gives off.

You know the one.

That delicious intoxicating beauteous head-in-the-clouds toffee-wine-beeswaxy aroma, after your mead has been ageing for a few months.

What's that all about?

Is it just a side effect of the sugars breaking down? Because I know that wines in general develop nice smells as they age, though not smells that are *quite* like the mead aroma.

Is it the wild yeast or bacteria that live on the honey naturally? I have a wild yeast which I'm growing, a Brettanomyces (or possibly a combination of a Sacch and a Brett) that gives a fustiness similar to mead after a while - so maybe it's an effect you get from some sugars being broken down.

We've noticed some meads have a beeswax smell too - I thought this might point in the direction of the bacteria as well, but then, in rendering beeswax you would kill bacteria and it keeps that smell anyway.

Some of the enzymes in honey?

Or does mead made with boiled honey have the same smell?

(My burnt honey mead has a wonderful caramel character though it's definitely not the same as the typical mead smell).

 

[TimT]

Bump! Pageing Airgead and Mark, who between them seem to know anything about everything and everything else besides. Any suggestions? (There's also some good feedback going on in the Got Mead Forum, where members have observed that the smell varies depending on how you make the mead, etc).

 

[Airgead]

Ummm... yeah. I love the "mead smell" but like you really don;t know what the chemistry is. Some sort of volatile that gets produced by oxidisation of some of the non sugar compounds in honey would be my best guess.

 

[TimT]

Airgead, I was thinking along the same lines though some of the feedback at Got Mead is interesting - Chevette Girl says she's noticed mead that's been back-sweetened or 'step fed' (I'm not sure whether she means given successive feeds of yeast nutrient, or successive additions of honey to reward the higher alcohol tolerant yeasts and nudge the alcohol level up) tends to have a richer smell. And certainly the beeswaxy part of the smell would suggest something already present in the honey when it's in the comb - maybe a bacteria that lives on the wax and the honey?

So maybe it's a combination of these factors - compounds breaking down, and fragrances that remain in the honey through the fermentation???

 

[Airgead]

Could well be.

Its almost certainly a breakdown product of something. Its unlikely to be formation of a complex molecule from simple precursors because that would likely be too heavy to be volatile. My money is on something complex breaking down into something that is then light enough to be volatile.

I would suspect probably not a bacteria as they are unlikely to survive fermentation (yeast competition and high alcohol) plus honey its self is strongly antibacterial. A chemical process rather than biological would be my guess. I'd guess at oxidisation as the chemical process concerned. Micro amounts of o2 reacting with something in the honey to produce something.

Cheers
dave

Edit - I'll check out the gotmead discussion as well.

 

[TimT]

Fair enough - though I was under the impression that one reason honey was partly able to repel bacteria so effectively was because of lacto-bacilli that live naturally on it - eg,

Thirteen lactic acid bacteria found in the honey stomach of bees have shown promising results in a series of studies. The group of bacteria counteracted antibiotic-resistant MRSA in lab experiments. The bacteria, mixed into honey, has healed horses with persistent wounds. The formula has previously been shown to protect against bee colony collapse.

However, point taken about the high alcohol content killing off most bacteria.

Other interesting parts of the honey recipe are the enzymes that it contains - amylase and invertase, amongst others.

 

[Airgead]

Wasn't aware of the lacto in bee stomach thing. Must look into that.

But I'm still inclined to think oxidisation.

 

[TimT]

Yeah you've kind of convinced me! I've had similar smells in some aged beers.