Viking Blood Recipe?

[DrYeast]

Has anyone tried to make a recipe similar to Viking Blood? If you've not seen it, it's a 19% mead with hops and hibiscus in it (so says the bottle). My wife loves the stuff, but it's a bit sweet for me. I thought I'd split the difference and try something in between. It's got a great warming effect, and has a really nice flavor and color. The site is not in english, but the rightmost bottle is the one I found in the states. Any idea how I should start on this? I'd be happy with advice on how to use hops and hibiscus in mead.

http://www.mjod.dk/?q=node/48

[ziggy]

Well from what I can tell you would have to use in the neighborhood of 20 pounds of honey for a 5 gallon batch. How sweet would you say it is? The trick would be balancing the bitterness and sweetness. If you measured the FG of the commercial product with a hydrometer you can backtrack to what your OG should be and figure out how much honey you will need. Then you need to figure out if there is hop bitterness or hop aroma. If there is some hop bitterness you would need to boil the hops some. If not, you can just steep the hops and hibicus to get some of the flavor. The best idea would probably be to make 1 gallon batches and see if you can get it right.

[DrYeast]

yeah, that's my plan, I'll try that and report how it goes. Since the ABV is so high (19%), I'm guessing that they used a wine strain (best guess is lalvin ICV K1V-1116 or EC-1118 based on the alcohol resistance) and just overload or back sweeten after fermentation with honey to leave residual sweetness. I didn't detect any excessive bitterness or aroma, but others have reported hop flavor and aroma (I'm guessing that's age dependent). I'll play around with it to see what I can do. Thanks for the advice.