Son-of-an Oskaar Cyser!

Mead...

*note to self: need a couple more size 6 1/2 drilled stoppers...hee!*

The lemon-date-cinnamon mead has been racked! And it is good!

Son-of-an-Oskaar Cyser, named for the famous Gotmead.com mazer who helped me make this baby, is finally into aging bottles. It has been sitting in the secondary fermenter for a LONG time, but this goes to show that a good recipe and quality ingredients make for well-aging mead.

Ooo but it does smell like heaven! Slightly lemony-y and VERY cinnamon-y, honey-sweet, rich, and ready to drink--needs no more aging. Gone is the astringent dryness and yeasty smell (aging solves many things). Smooth and VERY alcoholic (how are these meads of mine ending up with so much alcohol??) (wish I had thought to take measurements so I could tell you how much but OH WELL), the dryness from the last tasting smoothed out now and is just right for my taste.

Mead is frequently made one gallon at a time. I haven't yet gotten a batch that has lasted long enough to make bottling worth the effort. I just rack from the secondary fermenter into sanitized Martinelli apple juice bottles and slap an airlock on'em. This batch was a two-gallon endeavour though and netted three bottles and some. Libchik and I ('I' mostly) dispatched the 'some' since I ran out of stoppers. Mead does share with other fermented beverages the requirement to be kept away from oxygen once the primary fermentation has been accomplished. Without a stopper and an airlock(most meads have some tiny residual yeasties that will continue to produce carbon dioxide unless chemically stabilized--no chemicals in my mead, so the airlock is important to keep the stopper from popping out), you'll shortly have an undrinkable waste of good honey.

I love mead.

Time to make another batch. It'll be a few days before I'll be up to it. By a cruel twist of the lemon of fate, I can't drink but a glass or two at a time and not every day at that without ending up wishing I'd not had any. I had four glasses last night--Libchik really doesn't drink to speak of and I couldn't let it go to waste. First mead I've had since April.

I've got everything I need to make another batch of Joe's Ancient Orange Mead except for a nice fresh orange so I may make that. Actually, I've got quite a lot of honey here so I guess I could make just about any recipe. I WANT BUCKWHEAT HONEY!! I've got ten pounds of tupelo and even killer bee honey, but no buckwheat.

Crystals and Donna Eden's energy exercises have really made me feel better between attacks of migraine and Meniere's, better enough that I was able to get this mead racked in short order after this allergic reaction last Friday. Mead is forgiving, too. After racking out of the primary, it can sit very quietly in a nice dark place, yeast slowly munching honey sugar, for many weeks and months without being any worse for wear. It will wait until I feel better.

Mead...breakfast of Champions. Check out Gotmead.com and say hello to Vicky the webmistress. If you want to learn the art of meadmaking, check out The Compleat Meadmaker by Ken Schramm. No finer book out there for meadmaking. And be kind to bees. Consider calling a beekeeper to get them out of your walls instead of an exterminator. As go the bees, so go we.

Now, to settle on which batch to make next...