Meadmaking
Brew logs, batch notes, and the mistakes I'll admit to in public.
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meadmaking
Retiring the Wet Towel
The makeshift swamp cooler served honorably. It has been replaced by a chest freezer with a brain — and Batches Two and Three just moved in, one of them riding a fresh load of apricots.
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meadmaking
The Tincture Library, Round Three
Fourteen new jars went under vodka this week — saffron, elderflower, Citra hops, even dried apricot. Here's why the tincture library keeps growing, and the full roster of what's on the shelf.
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meadmaking
Batch One: Bottling Day
Six bottles, one confession, and the three lessons Batch One taught me on its way out the door. The first mead is in glass — now it just has to survive until November.
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meadmaking
Batches Two and Three: One Brew Day, Two Meads
Six pounds of Georgia tupelo, a packet of champagne yeast, a new conical fermenter, and a plan to split one fermentation into a sparkling mead and an apricot melomel. Day zero, mistakes included.
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meadmaking
Batch One: It Turned Into Wine
A week on the oak and vanilla, and the flat, yeasty mead from racking day has quietly become something that smells like Sauvignon Blanc. Plus the plan for sweetening — off-dry, by taste.
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meadmaking
Why I Made a Dozen Jars of Spice Tincture
Adding spice straight to a fermenter is an irreversible guess. Tinctures let you extract each flavor separately and dose the finished mead by the drop — so I started a whole library of them.
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meadmaking
Batch One: Racking Day
Two matching hydrometer readings, a first honest taste, and moving day: off the lees, onto fresh oak and a Tahitian vanilla bean — plus the case for leaving the water out.
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meadmaking
Batch One: Week One
Seven days of fermentation: a foam cap, a nutrient schedule, two oak cubes, one silent airlock that nearly fooled me, and a first taste at 1.030.
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meadmaking
Batch One: Brew Day
My first mead batch: three pounds of Georgia wildflower honey, a packet of 71B, and a gravity reading I had to argue with before I believed it.