Brew Dudes

With 5 gallons of Medium Show mead made, I was able to split up the batch to experiment with flavors. Yesterday, I finally bottled up the last of it and now I am taking the time to write up a recap of the experience.

The mead was made from raw local honey that I bought from an apiary. I probably could have bottled it all without the flavor experiments but the thought of limiting my options was unappealing to me. At last count, I have 4 different flavors.

• Oaked – Conditioned on oak, it tastes like a Chardonnay
• Blueberry – Added blueberries to the secondary, has some port notes
• Chamomile – Fresh flower picked from my sister-in-laws garden. Too early to tell
• Medium Mead – Plenty of honey flavor

The first three were all conditioned in gallon bottles, which gives you four full 750 ml bottles. I had two gallon of the unflavored kind that I bottled for later drinking and competition.

With all these flavors, now I can have a Catalina Wine Mixer.

One upgrade to the mead project was using bottles that could be corked, which also meant using a floor corker. Mike bought a very nice one and it you are looking to buy, purchase a high end model. I don’t have experience with a cheap one, but the more expensive one was worth every penny.

I think I will add a few of the medium show mead bottles to see if they change over time. Maybe the corked bottles will allow them to age differently from the ones I capped a few years ago.

Mead making is very easy as compared to beer brewing. Yeah, it is more expensive. Yeah, you may need to buy some new equipment to cork bottles. These are valid points. Another valid point is the fact that mead making gives you an chance to expand your skill set and can be pretty rewarding with some planning and some imagination for some flavor additions after fermentation.

I brewed a honey saison on Sunday and the fermentation has been good so far. The wort was chilled to 65 degrees Fahrenheit to start off with, which was pretty close to the temperature of my yeast starter. After aerating the wort for 30 to 45 minutes while I cleaned up the rest of the brewing stuff, I swirled the starter a few times and poured it into the top of my fermentor.

Note: sometimes the yeast runs down the carboy and due to the clarity of it, I can’t tell if it is running down the outside or the inside. There is always a short time of panic when I see this occurrence. I post this note as a reminder to take the time to ensure that the yeast will have no chance of going anywhere but the inside of the carboy. If you have to put the top of your yeast starter jug right on the edge of your carboy, do it. Now maybe I will remember next time.

I was happy to see the signs of fermentation between 12 and 18 hours after I pitched. The past few fermentations I have overseen have been messy. I have been waking up to yeast foam messes on the floor and elsewhere, but this saison fermentation has been tame in comparison. There was really ugly looking krausen going on but it wasn’t excessive.

I have been slowly playing with the temperature of the fermentation, raising it from the mid-60s to high 70s (as it sits right now). The intensity of the ferment has not changed much and now it appears that the krausen has died down and pretty much disappeared from the top of the beer.

I am going to keep the temperature where it is. Maybe mid-week next week, I will take a gravity reading and see how this beer is coming along. I am targeting a low final gravity so with the temperature staying higher than what I would have normally, I hope it is enough of a factor to push the yeast to their highest potential.