What I did for/with Mead today

[007]

Started 6 gallons traditional mead.

 

[MightyMosin]

Today was much sorting and boxing of bottles. Sorting by volume, shape, and type.
I have 5 buckets of bottles soaking in a PBW mix to make removing labels easier.

Drank a Blueberry Cyser while working on this.

I fed my Marshmallow mead. Will update other thread.

 

[Hoppy2bmerry]

Yesterday I gave the last drop of nutrients to the bochet, and made adjustments to 2 meads I’m sending to competition. Today I bottled and shipped the entries.
I shouldn’t get dinged on appearance for this one.

 

[Maylar]

Where is the comp?

 

[Hoppy2bmerry]

Where is the comp?

Minnesota,they don’t freeze during transport. The first leg of the AMMA circuit.

 

[Maylar]

Minnesota,they don’t freeze during transport. The first leg of the AMMA circuit.

Got a link? Always looking for comp venues.

 

[Hoppy2bmerry]

Got a link? Always looking for comp venues.

https://home.valkyrieshorn.com/
Can always find them at AHA.

 

[MightyMosin]

Today I drank a 6.0% session Honey Crisp and a 13% Blueberry Cyser while I made an Italian free form bread loaf... which turned out incredible.

Why does U.S. flour suck so bad compared to Italian or French flour?

 

[Maylar]

Yum. I'll take a warm slice of that with peanut butter for lunch please

 

[Hoppy2bmerry]

That’s a beautiful loaf that would look great on the https://www.homebrewtalk.com/threads/homemade-bread-thread.457601/page-77#post-10445156
As for the quality of flour, I suspect the additives are very different. I bake most of my breads with organic AP four from Costco which is quite affordable, but one must buy 20# at a time.

My bochet is still fermenting the caramel flavors are all there from the sample I’d taken.

 

[MightyMosin]

Racked a Bochet for the Solera project. Racked a hydromel that needs to be back sweetened so that I can blend with my Cucumber session that has too much cucumber flavor.

 

[DrWizzard]

I made hot spiced mead

 

[DrWizzard]

I made hot spiced mead

Update its pretty good and warms my belly

 

[MightyMosin]

Racked my Marshmallow mead v4 through a 50 micron filter (x2)... I should have better filtered the marshmallow root before fermentation as enough clogged the filter that I had to use 2 of them.

Started a Viognier pyment. My first one was great, but my next batch has a fault that I'm trying to wait out... so another new one was in order as I did enjoy it the first time I made it.

I enjoyed another Blueberry Cyser while doing this.

 

[MightyMosin]

Solera project racked and back sweetened. I now have a full barrel again.

Lots of cleaning along the way. I still say that the Mark II carboy and keg cleaner has been a worthwhile investment as it allowed me to continue other things while cleaning is in progress.

A similar item has been a small transfer pump which is useful for cleaning tubing as well as the inner parts of my auto-siphon and my Kegland jiggler siphon. 10 minutes of PBW followed by rinsing leaves the much cleaner that I would do on my own.

I sampled my waterless mead I did last year and it is coming along nicely. Less tart that a few months ago and the strawberries have backed down a bit and the other berries are more present now. I don't remember the exact ABV, though its in the 15% range IIRC and it has no real heat at all. The mouth feel is great, even is slightly viscous.

 

[MightyMosin]

Back sweetening of 2 meads today along with some acid adjustments to one of them.

Also have some 1/2 gallon bottles of honey getting liquid again so I can start some traditional meads later in the week, I hope.

 

[Elk479]

Started a 1 gallon batch of traditional some local wildflower honey that was sourced in 2018. OG came in at 1.1.06 about where I wanted it.

I have 2 quart jars left, my thought process is that if its needed I would use 1 jar to back sweeten future meads and the other for another batch. Otherwise I could just source some other honey and look to make 2 batches haven't decided yet.

 

[007]

Moved 6 gallons of traditional to secondary to settle. Have 6.25 gallons to bottle.

 

[Baltic419]

Today I pulled the bags of blood oranges from the primary of my 10 day old first batch of 2025. And cracked open a bottle of my coffee mead that I bottled in January.

 

[Maylar]

Racked my traditional to a 5 gallon Speidel. Added Xoakers and some vanilla tannin, K-Meta and Sorbate. I'll give it a couple months before tasting it again.

Thinking of starting a cyser before the weather changes. Brew room is about 62F now but that won't last long. Too bad the orchards are closed until Spring, I'd have liked to use local cider.

 

[Hoppy2bmerry]

Took a small sample of the bochet, tasted it and checked gravity. Almost finished fermenting, and it tastes good. (Though I haven’t ever tasted one before so I really don’t have anything in memory to compare it to.)

 

[MightyMosin]

Racked 3 gallons of waterless mead that I started last year. Tastes nice, but I may play with some acid or other adjustments. Not sure yet.
Drank a small glass of the waterless.
Racked 5 gallons of my Honey Crisp session. It's now ready for me to play with blending it and my Cucumber session.

Cleaned, rinsed, passivated, rinsed and then sanitized the new BrewBuilt conical that came in on Saturday.

 

[MightyMosin]

Racked ~5.5 gallons of a mead that was based on a dragon fruit wine kit. It was never good and has sat on Xoakers for >1.75 years. It didn't end up over-oaked, which I was surprised about, though there was a ton of oak related dust-sediment at the bottom.

I probably left about 1/4 gallon at the bottom, but I avoided all the oak dust/sediment at the bottom getting racked over.

I then proceeded to bench test acid adjustments. The short story is that all my initial amounts were just too high. In the end I ended up with a .5% cacao nib extract addition and .065% tartaric acid adjustment to get a blasé mead to an OK mead. It's not a huge success but it is no longer a mead that I would relegate to the cheapo-getting-drunk-on category. Maybe it will taste better in another year?

All of the bench tests were focused on maintaining the honey flavor, keeping the fruit and making it more interesting. In the bench testing, I was using 50ml base amounts and adjusting on those. I eventually needed to switch to 100ml base so that I could get more accurate 1/2% additions of the cacoa nib extract.

I will also add that the high accuracy digital scale came in handy today as I really needed that 3 decimal point accuracy so that I could accurately scale up small 100 ml tests to the full carboy without over/under shooting the target. The scaling hit perfectly and matched my final bench test batch.

Every time a batch wasn't good, it was dumped... there were a lot of 50 ml batches that went down the sink as the acid was just too high or I didn't like the specific acid in it. I was bouncing around through tartaric, citric and malic acid. Tartaric is where I found the most pleasant flavor for this specific batch.

Between the spouse and I, we probably went through 1/4 gallon. That ended up OK as my carboy was sitting pretty much at an even 5 gallons after the bench tests. That final 5 gallons was converted out to ML, divided by 100ML to get the amount of parts I was working with and then multiplied out by the batch adjustment values for the full batch additions. That testing added up and I'm feeling it a bit... Not good to do this on a fasting day

Most of my meads don't go through this amount of tweaking, but I really hated this mediocre mead that needed to move into the palatable category. At least when I eventually bottle, it might be worth it... I hope.

 

[MightyMosin]

Racked my Marshmallow v3 from barrel to a keg for later bottling. Almost 5 gallons.

Racked Marshmallow v4 into the barrel that was just emptied. Right about 6 gallons.

 

[Lampy]

I actually drank some mead! Saying goodbye to alcohol for 40+ days and thought I would celebrate with one of my aged, rarer products (mead).

 

[Lampy]

That testing added up and I'm feeling it a bit... Not good to do this on a fasting day

If I may ask, why the fast?

 

[MightyMosin]

If I may ask, why the fast?

It helps with weight maintenance and keeping glucose levels in check.

I usually fast for 12-16 hours twice a week and have a lower calorie dinner. I haven't done a full 24 hour fast.

 

[Kyzaboy89]

Proud to say today marks 10 years married and we finally get to open the last bottle of Peach Melomel, also 10 years bottled. Sweet honey with a light wine tang on the front with a tart white peach to follow. No bitterness or alcohol bite and wishing we had more, very happy and blessed to be hear. Cheers everyone!

 

[Dan O]

Proud to say today marks 10 years married and we finally get to open the last bottle of Peach Melomel, also 10 years bottled. Sweet honey with a light wine tang on the front with a tart white peach to follow. No bitterness or alcohol bite and wishing we had more, very happy and blessed to be hear. Cheers everyone!View attachment 870240

Happy anniversary

 

[Ren06]

Proud to say today marks 10 years married and we finally get to open the last bottle of Peach Melomel, also 10 years bottled. Sweet honey with a light wine tang on the front with a tart white peach to follow. No bitterness or alcohol bite and wishing we had more, very happy and blessed to be hear. Cheers everyone!View attachment 870240

Happy Anniversary

 

[MightyMosin]

Saying goodbye to alcohol for 40+ days

I thought about doing this, but there is a Mead event that I skipped last year when I gave up alcohol. This year is giving up meat.

 

[MightyMosin]

My mead activities today is drinking a Blueberry Cyser as well as a minor tasting of my Viognier pyment from June 2024.
That pyment had a Lactic Acid Bacteria fault that came across as corn chip. It seems that two of the three kegs have aged out that fault. Hurray.

 

[Maylar]

Rigged up a rope hoist to get the Speidel off the floor and into my brew room for secondary -

It'll sit here for a while, getting yummy -

Now to order some honey and pick up some FAJC to start a Cyser. Think I'll go with White Labs WLP715 for that.

 

[seatazzz]

Yesterday visited my favorite apiary and picked up 6lbs of wildflower honey, which as soon as I got home was transformed into 2.5g of what will be a blackberry melomel. They were out of their blackberry honey, tasted the wildflower and immediately said yes. Added the first dose of fermax this morning, will add more tomorrow then lay it by for a week or so until racking over, and the blackberries go in.

 

[MightyMosin]

It's behind schedule, but my 2025 Christmas mead is now yeast pitched.

This years has been dropped about 1.2%abv, partly because I'm behind where I want to be.

The good part is I have plenty of the 2024 batch which should be going great at the end of the year.

 

[Hoppy2bmerry]

Packaged an entry for NHC. I don’t expect it to go through, but since I paid the entry fee I’m submitting something.

 

[MightyMosin]

It feels like its becoming a tradition for me that I am drinking a Blueberry Cyser while doing or after mead stuff and today that continues.
Today I started a 5.5 gallon batch of what I hope becomes a peanut butter and jelly mead.

About half the must is pure concord juice by Welch's and the rest if a orange blossom must that ends up about 11.5% ABV potential. I'll let this ferment out and then I'll start some small trials to determine how much powdered PB to use and where I want to sweeten to, though I image that will end up fairly high as the pH is fairly low at 3.3. Lalvin B71 should eat some of that malic acid and raise the pH up some.
Edit: No fermentation activity this morning. I hydrated 10g of 71-B with Go-Ferm Sterol Flash. This was on a heated plate stirrer and after 15 minutes, I killed the heat and added about 25mg must to it. I did that every 15 minutes for about 45 minutes until the started yeast was within about 8 degrees of the must temperature and then I pitched it. It is now near the end of the day and fermentation is going along really well. It's a bit ahead of schedule but I also gave it the 24 hour nutrition.

Today I also tested a variety of meads for free SO2 to find them all sorely lacking. Thankfully good sanitizing has kept most of these free of issues. Probably make another post about this separately at some point.

 

[MightyMosin]

I racked about 5 gallons of mead today and it should hopefully be the last rack of that particular one. I added some more K-Meta to a variety of meads that have been sitting and I'll probably run a bunch of SO2 tests tomorrow if the work schedule allows for it.

 

[MightyMosin]

Today I bottled ~1.5 gallons of the Solera project generation 1. This had been in barrel about a year and is quite delicious. I'll try to not touch these too much as I hope that at the end of three years that I will have enough samples from each stage of the project.

I was going to bottle up my v3 of Marshmallow mead but it was too cloudy. I wasn't thinking and it was racked from the barrel straight to a keg. Great for lack of O2, but I didn't verify that it was as clear as it should be. This will be racked to a carboy where I can see that it is cleared.

And I'm enjoying a blueberry cyser while I type this.

 

[Maylar]

And I'm enjoying a blueberry cyser while I type this.

Wouldn't that be a melomel?