Oy! Too busy…

Sometimes I really don’t like my job. There are tomes I get so busy I can’t do things I need to do, like, bottling. *sigh*

I finally got around to tasting a few yesterday. The carrot honey mead was a pleasant surprise. What an amazingly complex taste! It’s really good now, but in a few months it will be even better. I got 6 bottles out of the batch. One went to tasting at The Brew Hut, and Steve, the guy who asked me to try that honey, is jealously guarding the rest.

The second round of pyments and wines all taste good, none the worse for their extended stay in the carboy. I will be bottling these today, knock wood. I have not tasted the other 6 beer yeast honey experiment batches. I intend to bottle those next weekend, once I’m back from yet another trip.

The ABC batch tastes like liquid Christmas and apple pie. It will bulk age a little longer. I also intend to give the port a little TLC soon, but my forced neglect may have turned it into a lost cause. We will see.

And that’s the update. More as it develops.

Ale Yeast Mead Experiment – Bottled

It is done. Bottled. It was also a lot more work than I had anticipated, so nothing else has been bottled yet. *sigh*

There were a few surprises in fermentation, but they all seemed fine. I’m not going to say much yet because I’ll be doing a few blind taste testings and I don’t want to give anything away.

Time to get some rest.

Bottling Time

This weekend will be all about bottling. I need to bottle the blended dry oaked batch and the orange cinnamon batch. I will also be bottling the mead ale yeast experiment and prepping bottles for shipment.

I tried the dark mead again this last weekend, this time with a partial mash and extract. I got better results, but not as good as I hoped. I did a smaller full AG batch for a lager just before which came out within 2 points of the target, so I know something else is going on. I think it may be the way ProMash is determining the gravity potential of the grains. I used Beer Tools Pro to calculate the same recipe, and it came out very close to where I ended up. This has made me go hrmmmmm…