I finally got around to bottling that pomegranate mead I'd been aging in the bathroom closet today. I meant to bottle this stuff around Thanksgiving of last year when it had been aging for just longer than a year. I somehow lost the subsequent nine months and finally forced myself to get off my ass and get it bottled by calling a friend of mine on Friday and asking him to come over and help on Sunday. I find it hard to motivate myself when I don't have to worry about inconveniencing someone else.
My buddies Justin and Rob came over this afternoon and we got the equipment sanitized, the mead transferred from the carboy into the bottling bucket and then the whole shebang bottled, capped and labeled (with a sharpie marker on the cap) in record time. The only weird thing was that when I dipped the stick of my siphon into the mead, it foamed up like mad. I'd never had one do that to me, and it wasn't like the mead had been stored under pressure during fermentation. The airlock lets CO2 from the fermentation escape but allows no outside air to come into the fermenter, so the pressure is only slightly higher than the outside atmosphere (however much pressure a half-ounce of water can resist is how much higher). I was a little worried that the CO2 rushing from solution would overflow the carboy and send pink mead all over my counter, but it subsided before getting that far up the neck of the carboy and the rest of the process went fine. It's a good thing it was mead and not beer. The proteins from the grain used to make beer make the bubbles last longer (the reason beer has a head and champagne is just fizzy) and this would have been a disaster instead of just scare. After we finished up bottling the mead, we grilled some hamburgers and played around on the Wii. Not an action filled day, but it's nice to hang out with a few friends for the afternoon.
3 comments:
Have to admit this is the first time I've ever heard of pomegranate mead ... Actually did a google search on it and came up on the very descriptive words: Made from the "Treasure of Asia Minor" the
juice of the exotic pomegranate is blended
with golden sweet honey and fermented
together." Now I know.
I've bottled my fair share of wine, but never beer. As a group of four, we knocked out 140 bottles of wine in under 2 hours. Wise call bringing in the help.
Sid: Mead is to honey what barley is to beer and what grapes are to wine. My pomegranate mead just has a half gallon of juice from the pomegranates on my pomegranate bush in the 5-gallon mix. The Norse considered mead to be the beverage of the gods.
Julie, I never make batches big enough for 140 bottles. Most of mine run about 48 12-oz. bottles. I think after I got the bottles cleaned off that we spent maybe an hour at most getting things sanitized and bottled. Bringing in help makes the process a lot more interesting, though. And bottling beer is very similar to bottling wine, except that home brewers typically add a homemade simple syrup or unfermented wort to the beer so the yeast can carbonate the beer.
This is a still mead, so it was exactly the same as bottling wine (except I bottled with metal caps instead of corks.)
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