Hard Lessons Learned and Some Meads

I mentioned in my last post that I started off my quest to someday own a winery with failure. I also left off by saying that I had learned a number of lessons. So this post will explain some of those lessons.

Lesson 1: If you think that you have done enough research, keep researching.

Lesson 2: Don’t cut corners with cheaper methods, when you don’t understand how the process works.

Lesson 3: Experience is much more valuable than research.

Okay, so with these lessons learned, I set out to make new and better wine. This time, I made two different batches of mead. Mead is a fermented drink that is very similar to wine, but instead of sugar, honey is used.

The first batch that I mixed was a blackberry mead. I did not follow a recipe, as you will see I do often as these posts continue. My inexperience led me to believe that I could guess and create a mead that would be pretty good.

So I took three pounds of honey and dissolved it in just under a gallon of warm water. I put that in a one-gallon, glass carboy and added about one pound of blackberries. I pitched the yeast and fitted the carboy with an air lock. Then I took the carboy down to the basement.

The airlock is used to keep oxygen out of the carboy, so that the alcohol does not get oxidized.

The second batch was a mead, that I had read a little bit about on the internet. It was a chocolate mead. It sounded different, but it sounded good. The author of the recipe claimed that it was very good, but it needed to be aged for two years. So I mixed all of the ingredients together, put it in a gallon-sized carboy, pitched the yeast, and placed it in the basement.

Several months later I decided that both of the meads ready to bottle. The chocolate mead was still sweat, but I assumed that it would be fine. So I bottled it without using any chemicals that would prevent further fermentation. Both bottlings went well, and I had four bottles of both meads.

Around the holidays, I was able to open the blackberry mead and it turned out fairly dry but fruity. I have one bottle left today, which is being saved for some unknown special occasion.

Months later the bottles of chocolate mead began to push the corks out, and I lost all of those bottles. What seemed to have happened is that fermentation continued inside the bottles. Pressure built up and forced the corks out.

Lesson 4: Always use chemicals to stop fermentation.

In my next post, strange fortune smiles upon me and pineapple wine.