Piggybacking onto this thread.....
I've always used beer bottles for mead (it's easy, I have many, and they hold carbonation for those fruity meads.).
I see many people use wine bottles.
How tight does the cork really have to fit into the bottle? Once the ABV is at 15% or so, can you use a "loose" cork? I am thinking specifically about all of the hard liquor bottles I recycle that have cork tops, I wonder if I can put still mead in them. For those not familiar, the corks are not designed to hold any pressure at all, but appear to pretty much lock out any gas exchange as long as you don't transport across large elevation changes.