• Welcome to the new forum! We upgraded our forum software with a host of new boards, capabilities and features. It is also more secure.
    Jump in and join the conversation! You can learn more about the upgrade and new features here.

I have a big mead problem

SleepySamSlim

Grandmaster Brewer
Joined
Dec 10, 2008
Messages
277
Reaction score
0
Location
North of Kalifornia
First off let me apologize for this entire post - I'm embarrassed to admit to any of this but thats life sometimes.

Have you ever really procrastinated ? I mean really really procrastinated? Well I have at times (a lot) done that.

So from 2007 - 2010 I was brewing beer and got pretty good at it doing partial mashes. Life went sideways in 2010 and I just quit brewing ... but the last thing I brewed was my first mead. Somewhere around 14lbs (I think) of premium orange blossom honey into a 5gal mead. Got the mead into a glass carboy  - pitched yeast - put it into a heavily insulated thermal chamber. And then said the hell with it. And every few months I said I gotta dump that out ... for 10yrs.

So its sat in a corner of the garage - in a sealed thermal box - for 10yrs. So when I recently decided to brew again I had to organize and clean things. Fortunately my wife was nearby when I cracked the box open -- she said wow that smells really nice. Hmmmmm - you see my sense of smell is totally screwed up due to sinus issues. So I hefted the carboy into the house sanitized a wine thief and we did a sample. All three foodies in the house pronounced the mead very drinkable - but it could probably benefit from some back sweetening with some honey and the wife wants to add some fruit. I brew ales because its relatively simple and easy and I like beer. Mead and wine are far too subjective in taste and needing blending or sweetening etc. So now I have this mead that I don't want to screw up.

So based on zero knowledge my current plan is to rack off around 4-ish gallons of this mead into a bottling bucket. Then split that into 4 one gallon glass fermenters: one will only receive some fragrant / flavorful honey to back sweeten, then each of the others will get either raspberry or cherry or peach fruit. Then let them sit for a week to see if the yeast are still active .... then make some decision about how to bottle. I'm pretty sure its going to be more complicated than that ........... holy crap

Any thoughts ?  I again apologize ........
 
I'll add a comment - I found some files I made for this batch - 14.75lbs honey - 5gal water - did a simple no boil process. I also have records of daily stirring and adding DAP and other things mead needs. So it did get off to a start of sorts before I moved on
 
Back
Top