Blood Orange Sparkling Mead Cocktail

I have a Traeger pellet smoker. Yes, it is a nice smoker and it is really almost stupid proof – of course stupidity is way too prevalent but it works for many people. I use it for a lot of meat and a few non-meat things. I recently saw this article Blood Orange Mimosa about an interesting beverage in an email promoting Traeger focused recipes. It was a couple of weeks later when there were a lot of blood oranges in my local grocery store and I couldn’t resist buying a few.

Smoking Oranges

I found that the recipe was a little off in that after 15 minutes at 375° F I still had no grill marks on the orange halves. I smoked them for about a half hour before I removed them with no grill marks on them. I let them cool for a few minutes and pressed the juice out with my citrus press kitchen gadget. Nine blood oranges gave me just a tad over a pint of juice, the leftover pulp in the skins was also very tasty. Since we had a few “regular” oranges in the kitchen I also smoked them and collected their juice into a separate container.

Alternative To Sparkling Wine

The original recipe calls for sparkling white wine, I am a mead maker, I have a lot of white wine based grape pyments on hand but no sparkling white wine. I decided to try the idea using some Muscat Orange grape juice that was fermented with orange blossom honey as a pyment.

Carbonating Your Mead

I didn’t have a sparking pyment on hand but it was really easy to put some into a 2 liter plastic soda bottle and carbonate it to sparkling wine levels (or beyond). You do need a carbonation cap for the plastic soda bottle – the cap is reusable. The caps are available in either plastic or stainless steel. I have only seen them with ball lock style keg fittings though perhaps you can find a pin lock version if that is what you need. Mine will fit either gas-in or liquid-out ball lock disconnects. I actually bought the carbonation fitting which has a hose barb fitting on one side to use when cleaning the tap lines on my keezer (converted chest freezer with beer taps installed).

Gently fill the soda bottle, useless you are going to drink it right away you really want to avoid oxidizing the mead by splashing it in the presence of air. For the carbonation technique to work you do need to leave some head space in the bottle for the CO₂. Once the plastic bottle is mostly filled squeeze out the air and cap with the carbonation cap and fill from the CO₂ cylinder at around 35 psi then shake a lot before refrigerating it. The mead will carbonate faster if it is chilled. If the mead is already chilled to fridge temps you can carbonate it in just a few minutes with shaking.

The Muscat Orange pyment has a more intense flavor profile than the typical sparkling white wine. Orange blossom honey is pleasantly flavorful and the muscat orange juice really adds to the complexity. In addition, the original gravity of my mead was much higher than the typical sparkling wine so the ABV was higher than the typical sparkling wine (about 17%). If you want to reduce the ABV you could blend in some sparkling water at serving time or add some water to the mead before carbonating it.

Many mead makers have the ability to work with the base recipe. If you can carbonate one of your meads you can experiment with this recipe. Many traditional meads could also work in this recipe. A plastic soda bottle with a CO₂ cylinder means you can carbonate almost any of your meads. An alternative to the plastic soda bottle is the plastic growlers that are legally used by breweries in some states – for example in Florida some jurisdictions allow plastic 1 liter plastic growlers that take a typical soda bottle cap.

If you have a smoker of any type you can smoke halved blood oranges – they don’t need to take on a lot of smoke for this, subtle is where it is at for this recipe. I noticed that some of the blood orange juice ended up dripping out of the oranges during the smoking – next time I think I will smoke them cut side up to maximize the amount of juice I can get from them. The blood oranges I found locally don’t seem to be very juicy.