Quick Mead Soap Question

[Goldensungod]

I recently made a soap with mead and for some reason it smells like licorice. I don't mind the smell I'm just wondering if anybody knows why it smells like licorice. The recipe is:
500 g coconut oil
190 ml unspiced JOAM(Joe's Ancient Orange Mead) variant
73 g NaOH

The ingredients in the JOAM variant is 1 orange, handful raisins, 3# honey, water to 1 gallon, and 1 tsp yeast. I let it ferment and tried to bottle carbonate(didn't work) it with a couple teaspoons white sugar.

When I added the lye to the mead it turned from light yellow to red and it boiled a little bit. The mead was around 12-14% ABV and semi-sweet.
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[ourwolfden]

JOAM! That stuff is wonderful, make sure you save a bottle for about a year and you will know what I am talking about. I’m not sure why it would smell like licorice through. It may have been all the extra sugars heating up is the best thing I can guess. JOAM is pretty sweet and with the additional sugar that you added that the yeast didn’t eat up (to carbonate the batch).

 

[Sihir]

I'm not sure if the soaping process had anything to do with it, but I've drunk my fair share of mead ( :shifty: ) and I have to say - some of them do smell and taste surprisingly like licorice. Especially when you start getting into the different types of honey and what kinds of flowers the bee visited, you can get some surprising variations. Perhaps it's the mead itself that has a faint licorice smell and it just got a bit amped in the soap?