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Are any of the others here brewers? I've just started 4 gallons of prickly pear mead. I've never had it, but hear it's great. I mashed and got the juice of some PP fruit (our area has millions of pounds of the stuff falling on the ground this time of year) and brought it up to 20% sugar with honey.

I've never brewed cacti, but I have brewed beer (and wine once, but it turned out badly). I've considered growing PPs for this reason, but I'm afriad the amount of fruit I would need would require me to have more plants than I have room for. I'm curious aboout how much fruit you actually need. Do you have a recipe?

You only need 4 or five pounds for a batch that will make 20-25 bottles, so a healthy plant could produce quite a lot of mead. As I said, it's supposed to be great. But like all mead, you may have to wait a year to drink it.

i always wanted to make prickly pear wine cuz here to it pretty abbundent i normaly will make wine out of mustang grapes what kind of yeast did you used and how much honey did you add for your 5 pounds of pears

Yes we need a recipe!!! Beer is getting pricey! lol Really though I never knew there was cactus alcohol. Again you learn something new everyday.

It's not that hard, and some one batch I made with raspberry honey, peppermint and red plums is to die for.

Put a half gallon or so up to a gallon and a half PP juice in the very clean bucket. Add 12 pounds honey. Then sterilize (either with heat or camden tabs. I use the tabs since heat can mess with honey's flavor). Then add some aggressive yeast like EC 1118, following the directions on the packet. Add some yeast nutrient (NOT OPTIONAL!!) that you can get from any brewery source.

That's pretty much it. The plastic air locks only cost about a buck. A good trick is to aerate it once per day the first three days. I use a drill and a paint mixer bit. After three days it will have to be air tight, and fermentation should take about 2 weeks.

Then you "rack" a couple times and let it age.

yea i'm gunna try to go pick a bunch of pears today i might have to order brewers yeast theirs no wine places around here i always used bread yeast is that stuff pretty sweet when your done with it if so i might used a little less honey i dont much care for sweet wine
for a air lock i normaly use them 5 gallon water jugs and get a hose and run it into a cup of water but i never sterilized them before

Remember honey doesn't have the nutrients especially Nitrogen that grapes and grain have, so if you don't add yeast nutrients the fermentation will kick out at just a few percent alcohol.

I wish you guys could see what's happening with the PP mead now. One bubble per second coming out of the air lock! By volume the yeast is creating a fifteenth of a gallon pure alcohol per day

And I was just thinking, looking at all those tons of PP fruit going to waste, you could get 20 bottles per 100 percent moonshine out of a 55 gallon drum full of those things, and you only have to wait two weeks for the final product.

Tim,
Let me know when you want to go commercial and we'll set up a little PP Mead ordering section on the site.

Daiv

I'd have to make a lot more before my personal thirst is quenched....