I like that you took samples of honey out of the same big pot instead of bocheting different pots for different times. Well designed experiment 👍

I use a sous vide heater stick to handle the temps. You set the water bath or brew kettle to a specific temperature, and it won't overshoot as you remove jars from the stock pot or brew kettle. the circulation of the water by the sous vide makes the temp more precise throughout the water bath or brew kettle due to continually moving of the water. Make it very repeatable.

A bochet still is on my to-brew list. Despite over 30 years of brewing meads… this video is pushing me closer to actually going for it.

If I may suggest a new project for you: I recently got out my "Maillard" bochet and it is incredible. It tastes like plums, figs, raisins and caramel. No burnt sugar. The idea is that you won't go into the caramelization as the temperature has to remain quite low. The recipe is easy: 1 tsp of DAP / kg of honey. Heat it up on medium fire, stirring now and then until you reach 120C. There, things will happen very fast: your honey can turn from yellow to black in 10 min, you have to do taste tests every minute or so, stirring constantly until you like it. Stall the reaction by putting the pot in cold water and then, when it is under 100C, add some water just to be sure. Don't be surprised if it starts to smell like ammonia around 80C, this is normal, it goes away when you reach the final temperature. One caveat is that the reaction cannot happen in acidic environment, when DAP breaks down with heat (the smell...), it raises the pH. The acidity of the final product is not a concern. Despite being super dark and rich in flavors, mine finished at 1.003 with the M05 yeast. Also worth saying that this process eradicates any honey character. Don't use the fancy stuff, you would waste it. Keep it for backsweetening and giving it that honey character it is lacking. Cheers

Racking a Raspberry Lemonade Mead made with a little under 2 lbs. of wildflower and 1 lb. Bochet'd wildflowers for around 30-40mins. My first time really attempting bochet and didn't want to go fully.

This is great. Wonderful resource!

Great content, thank you! As always.

I have the feeling that the mix of all trials was quite amazing.. Thanks for sharing! Cheers from italy

Thank you, I love making bochet and this video was one of my favourite of yours. Cheers CB

Really enjoy these testing videos. They really provide us with a lot of good info. Thank you for sharing

Really Enjoyed your Video , Thanks ! 🐯🤠

Classic William! What a class act.

Since you usually do 1 gallon batches, next time try a crockpot to bochet the honey. Consistent heat much easier to monitor. This is a great way to make small batch.

Thank you mate, made a mead with tender coconut water... Wow worked out well.... Cheers mate

I think the apple flavor on the 15 minute one will age out; I've had it from yeast faults, but it ages out fast. I'm glad you guys touched on the volume, time, and temp too, because that will have a huge effect on the cooking process. The sugars in honey are a bit funky with melting and other factors related to it because unlike heating many things, sugar's melting/caramelizing points is dependent on the heating rate and enthalpy rather than absolute enthalpy (ie factors like temperature, pressure, etc), so even the same volume, same atmospheric conditions, etc can result in different caramelization on different stoves. I've read a lot into this topic so it's fun to see bochet again. TLDR: the physics of heating reducing (?) sugars gets complex. I know it doesn't fit the experiment here, but for other readers, a trick from the baking world to protect your honey from burning when making bochet is to mix some water in before you turn your fire on, and to watch with a temp probe. The water will boil off and reduce risk of scorching on the bottom of the pan, and the thermometer can give you a ballpark idea of if you're getting close to a scorch (I normally don'y pass 120C)

I've also been planning on doing a botchet for a while now which is exactly why I was watching this video so thank you

There used to be a video on KZfaq 15 years ago, it was probably the first bochet video on here. I no longer see it, but the guy made it over a campfire

I always overcalculate when I make mist. So, I started saving extra must in a container and once the container gets full I pitch yeast. This first one has some must from a bochet I burned to bitterness and dumped. It smells amazing and tastes really good. It has a smokiness to it that’s unmatched. I highly recommend letting some honey burn, just a little. Get that Smokey.

I'm on my tenth batch about probably more. Haven't been counting haha but I'm going to try do some testing myself and I'll comment on here when it's done.

to get consistent temperatures I use the oven to bochet my honey. I track finishing temperature for consistency.

Answering the question in video on how to bochet them all "equally": use a sous vide. You can bochet honey, in a jar, at 122 in the sous vide. So if you had 6lbs of honey, in 6 different sealed jars, you could pull one jar at each time increment without losing volume or them cooking faster towards the end or any other negative variables. You'd just have to cook them longer to achieve the same result, so the time increments would be longer between jars.

Informative video. When did you start the clock on the bochet process (when you turn the burner on the stove, when it starts simmering, etc.)?

Great video that highlights the differences between different bochets, but if you really want to control the process, simply determine the temperature you want to cook the honey - and no matter the volume, control that temperature for the total volume and the ONLY variable is the time you are cooking the honey. Makes no difference if the volume is one pint or one gallon, if the temperature is say, 350 F then you maintain that temperature even as you remove volume - and you would need to either stir the honey so that the honey at the heat source is no hotter than the honey at the top OR you cook the honey in a pre-heated pot in the oven.

He talks about how cooking the honey at the same rate would be hard, and I don't know about that. He could do this experiment again, but instead of cooking the honey in the same pot, he could get different pots (more cleanup which sucks I know, and he did mention he didn't love the idea of multiple pots). An average stove in America has four to five burners. He could potentially cook all honeys from the 0 minute to one hour fifteen-minute increments at once with the right stove (Again though I don't know is he has this perfect stove). Start each pound of honey fifteen minutes after the last to make sure they all get the same amount of time at the end to cool. After cooling he can pour them all into 64 oz growlers or carboys at once. Afterwards it's the basic mix everything up and add yeast (the same species of yeast too to make sure only the bocheted honey is the only changing variable). Take this idea with a grain of salt. I'm just senior college student with very basic mead making skills going to a small-town college in Southeast, Kansas. The only time I ever met other homebrewers was during an internship in Oklahoma, City. Cool place btw anyone going through OKC should stop by "The Brew Shop". It's a little homebrew store on North Pennsylvania Avenue. Though back to bocheting (I'm diagnosed with ADHD and Asperger's sorry for the tangent). While using different pots at once is a hassle especially given the fact that honey boils up constantly. Maybe you could get someone to help you. Get BC or another BrewTuber involved. I would do this experiment myself (and not ask a youtuber of all people to do it for me, no offense I just like doing experiments myself because mead experiments are fun), my fraternity brothers in house would get mad at me (last time I made a bochet I did it in my own pot, and even though my pot got ruined they still got mad because the house smelled like honey, which is weird because who doesn't like the smell of honey?). I have to admit though I like the different bocheting experiments. When you mentioned in the apple pie mead video that you bocheted the mead less to get a different flavor I found that very interesting. Every bochet on every BrewTuber I have seen (seen so far at least) was always very dark in color including your Jon Snow mead (which I guess wasn't your recipe, but still, you did it that way). To see someone bochet less for a different flavor is very interesting. I'm very much looking forward to the one-year taste test video. Granted that is a year out, but nonetheless I can't wait. LOVE the content and keep it up. Also, thanks for teaching this dumb college student about the amazing (and sometimes complicated) world of Mead Making.

I don't know if a double boiler gets hot enough to bochet, but if it does that would pretty handily solve your heat control issue

100 woot woot. Nice test 👌

Awesome test! I've never done a bochet, but now I have a baseline for how long to boil. I'm thinking about a salted caramel vanilla ice cream mead (vanilla bean/lactose) and was going to use the bocheting process to help facilitate such. Thanks for helping refine my process. I'd rather learn from your tests than waste time making my own errors. Any thoughts or tips on the aforementioned mead I'd appreciate. Hey, was that dandelion I sent you any good? Peace out.

Got a Bochet in primary fermentation at this very moment. I cooked just over half my honey for 75 minutes. And left just under half uncooked. I'm expecting to stepfeed it at least once or twice making the cooked vs uncooked about 50/50. Then while aging I plan to give a good dose of vanilla and maybe even some salt.

Rather than time, a better measure might be temperature. As water evaporates the temperature rises. If you hit a plateau then time might also be relevant. For my Bochet I went to 275°F Anyone else have temperature notes?

Great video! Did you ever take the temperature of the honey while bocheting it? I heard somewhere that the "magic" happens when the honey reaches 250 degrees. I've also found that 45 minutes well. I don't like it when the honey gets too dark and starts tasting burnt.

To get same time and temp for each I recommend using a sous vide. Works like a champ!

…temperature will provide consistency & various volumes of honey will make times inconsistent

As soon as I get a 5gallon bucket of honey I’m going to try an “experiment” with 2 bochet (B and b) and 2 non bochet (A and a) batches where each pair (BA and ba) gets fermented at higher or lower temperatures. The idea being to see the “full” expression of one type of honey with different variables applied during fermentation. Then I want to try blending one “full expression” batch with the 4 batches. Seems like it would be a fun time

I wish you would have tracked finishing temperature when you pulled it instead of time. Your stove top vs everyone else's will be a lot different, so time is a worthless measurement. Tracking if you actually caramelized the honey would be better to know since most think you need to get to 270F to have caramelization.

I do feel as some of the descriptors i am hearing are the results of bocheting too quickly, and might be the result of scorching

What heat did you use? I’ve only bocheted honey for making a stout-braggot, but I haven’t really pinned down my process. Usually I just let it go on medium to medium low on a normal burner, or medium low to low on my fast boil burner, and bochet for about 75 min.

I'm actually doing this with a 50 min bochet but instead of testing diff times im breaking the honey into diff gravity's for a range of 5/7/9/11/13 %. might be cool to see it on your channel if you are feeling up to it :)

I know its still too early but will you be doing a 6 month or 1 year update. I.e. do you have any bottles left for aging comparison. I'd be interested to know if the favorite changes with some age

What a great video idea man. You inspired me to make a bochet and I did a really dark bochet over a year ago and am kinda afraid to taste it. When I tasted it before bottling it was way too sweet. Here's hoping they're good

Did we not get temp measurements of the honey as it was caramelizing? Just like candy making the longer it boils the less water is in it and the higher the temp will go. Might be a more accurate and repeatable measure for the darkness of the honey. Like he said at the end, hard to know how much heat was going into it.

just started my first brew ever. making strawberry peach mead. it's only been a cpl of days but I'm wondering how to prevent the fruit from molding or rotting in the carboy. anyone have any tips?

I do kinda wonder if you had skewed the taste by reducing the volume of honey you bochet'd at each time increment. You may have accelerated the carmelizing process accidentally heating an increasingly smaller volume. Would be interesting to see a fixed amount heated to a set time for each time interval.

Hmm Oaked brochette? Or with Walnut ?

Did you do a 1 year tasting on these bochet meads?

Rainbowchet

Now blend them all back together! Edit: Nevermind... I just saw the end. :)