austin_tycho

Mead was made last night. Or if you wanna get all fussy about it, must (the non-alcoholic stuff that will eventually turn into mead) for melomel (mead with fruit in it). Bob made a must for metheglin (mead with herbs in it). We'd bought our supplies a few days ago, and I took off a little early yesterday since the calls were pretty slow. Bob wanted to make a mead for Bean, who has many odd food allergies so instead of the usual lemon he used a lime, and added some damiana (a sweet herb with a relaxing effect similar to chamomile, but in higher doses is supposed to be an aphrodisiac) along with the bit of black tea for tannin. I used a lemon and 4 large valencia oranges with the tea. We added 2 tablets of yeast nutrient, and poured it into sterilized 1 gallon jars. After letting it cool for a good while we put Montrachet yeast in (I wanted to use sherry, but they were out) and capped it with the water locks.

Mine took off right away. I've been doing a bit of reading (Natalie's husband taught me the method many years ago, and I never really researched it) and I think this is because there was a lot of fruit juice in mine and the yeast like that. I tried to tell Bob that his was slow because he had cut his lime lengthwise instead of across, but he was wise to my shenanigans. But within an hour his was bubbling nicely. Images of the Good Eats beer episode came to mind, with the yeast sock puppets eating the sugar cubes then belching. By this morning, they were both going at a good pace so I stuck them in the fireplace where they'll sit for the next couple of weeks. It was cool to watch millions of yeast burps roil up through the opaque gold liquid, it looked like carbonated soda (S-O-D-A, soda). I'm not a pro- the bottling involves sitting on the floor with a piece of hose, so the mead ends up having sediment in it and I don't always wait the recommended 6 months to 2 years before I want to drink it. But it's still mucho fun.