Sweetfern tea mead

I grew up traipsing around the fields and woods near my home in Northeastern Connecticut, and one of my favorite areas was along the power lines. The heath-like vegetation there always had this distinctive, spicy, resinous smell that is hard to describe but unforgettable. At the time, I didn't know what the source was, until I got a bit older and read Peterson's Field Guide to Wild Edible Plants and learned about sweetfern, Comptonia peregrina. Sweetfern is not actually a fern, but a flowering plant, and I had never tasted a better tea (although white pine tea is a close second). Sweetfern tea has a unique and musky, jasmine-like aroma, and this was the main source of that aroma I smelled as I trudged through the brush under the high voltage right-of-way all those years ago. So when I started looking for herbs to add to my meads, sweetfern was a natural. 

And it did not disappoint. The jasmine-like floral aroma comes through deliciously in the mead and compliments the wildflower honey from my bees. It's become my go-to mead ingredient. Recently, I've been using sweetfern to experiment with brewing meads without added chemical nutrients. This seems a risky undertaking, because honey is nutrient-poor (except for sugars), so yeast nutrient is normally a must (no pun intended). But I did some research, and it turns out the delicious native sweetfern is also a nitrogen fixer. As a pioneer species, it has evolved a symbiotic relationship with a bacteria that can turn atmospheric nitrogen into a form that the plant can use, helping it to thrive in and regenerate disturbed and sandy areas like the glacial deposits where I grew up. It loves the same kind of environments as my other favorite plant, white pine. Because it's a nitrogen fixer, it has more nitrogen in its leaves than a typical plant would, and voila! we have a good source of natural yeast nutrients! 

So I'm going to give you two recipes for sweetfern mead--one with chemical yeast nutrients and one without. The recipe without chemical yeast nutrient uses more sweetfern, so it has a more pronounced sweetfern flavor, but this might even be better than the original recipe. 

As always, I need to acknowledge Groennfell Meadery for my original inspiration and base session mead recipe six years ago. Both of these recipes are for session meads, which is pretty much the only kind of mead I brew.

Recipe #1: Original Sweetfern Mead

For one gallon of mead:  Add 0.5 ounces of  sweetfern leaves (I use fresh or fresh frozen) to one quart of boiling water. Remove from heat, cover, and let cool. Add 1.5 pounds honey to some water and 1 tsp yeast nutrient (I use L. D. Carlson's urea and DAP mix). Stir to dissolve.Then add the warm tea to the honey/water/nutrient mixture and bring to 1 gallon. Sprinkle 1 packet of Lalvin D-47 yeast over the surface. Ferment in the 70s to low 80s.

Recipe #2: Sweetfern Mead - No DAP

For one gallon of mead:  Add 1 ounce of  sweetfern leaves (I use fresh or fresh frozen) to 1.5 quarts of boiling water. Remove from heat, cover, and let cool. Add 1.1 pounds honey to some water and 1 tsp yeast nutrient (I use L. D. Carlson's urea and DAP mix), then add the warm tea to the honey/water/nutrient mixture and bring to 1 gallon. Add 1 packet of Lalvin D-47 yeast, sprinkled on the surface. Ferment in the 70s to low 80s.

In both cases, ferment to a gravity of about 0.998, mix in 1 ounce of honey per gallon, and bottle condition for two weeks.

After two weeks, chill and pop open a bottle of herbal, musky, floral awesomeness. Let me know what you think!