120 bottles got delivered to my house and things just got real. Has that ever happened to you?
Phase 2 of the Wedding Mead project have kicked in now that I have to find a place to keep all of these 375 milliliter bottles until we are ready to use them.
The bottles are clear so the mead will need to be clear. Since this is a simple oaked dry mead, it should appear golden yellow with brilliant clarity. At least, that is my opinion and I won’t be happy unless it looks like that.
Some of the point of doing this project is to put myself to the test to see if I can make something spectacular with no margin of error. When I brew beer, normally I am the only one who is going to judge it.
If something goes wrong or it’s not quite to the excellent level that I was trying to achieve, I don’t lose sleep over it.
This mead is going to be given away as favors at a wedding so it has to be flawless It’s nice to have some pressure. You need to raise your game at times.
Since I ran an experiment a while ago to figure out if bentonite was a good mead clarifier, I know that I can use it to get rid of all the haziness and make all those proteins and yeast drop out.
With a shot of bentonite, some time, and another racking, we’ll be good to go in terms of the clarity. Then, it will be time to add the oak. I bought some French, double the price of American, medium toast oak spirals to lend their flavor to it. The last oaked mead I made (I almost typed “mead I meaded” – could we make that a thing?) was great. If you handed it to someone and told them it was white wine, they wouldn’t know it was made with honey and not grapes.
Is that the point? Should mead taste like honey wine and not like grape wine? Well, sure… and I’d tell you I taste plenty of honey flavors in grape wine too.
Anyway – that’s the latest update. I will put up some photos on Twitter and/or Facebook to show how well the bentonite clarifies mead.
See the related posts to the wedding mead project here:
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