Nov
5
Inoculating tomorrow morning. Two primary fermenters full of mead.
The Falling Blog
My mind and actions in viewable format.
Posts tagged mead
Mead is civilization.
Sep
18
Demijohn Cordage
I’m in a bind (no pun intended), I let my friend borrow a bottom of a demijohn container, and I have a huge mead project to start. I have recently become very worried about my glass demijohns. They are big, bulky, and made of oh so brittle glass. I wanted to make a cordage bag to protect them and make moving them around a little more safe. (Incidentally, while making this project, my one Demijohn broke into 1000 pieces during sanitization, so this project is even more warranted. Oh man was that scary when it broke O_O)
I had the cordage lying around from a nice sale at Ace hardware. I looked up some how to’s on my favorite DIY site and found an excellent starter project.
The result is a very sturdy and unique carboy bag that will protect if from bumps while I’m cleaning and transporting it. I also added a handle line so that it could be more easily moved.
I’m sad that I had to lose a demijohn today, but I’m really glad I have a method of protecting the new one. If anyone knows of where you can get Lexan demijohns of 15 gallon size, please let me know?
Sep
10
It has been a really long couple of weeks for us. I’ve been out of town on business and my wife has had to hold down the fort.
As a celebration of being together again after such a long trip, my wife and I went on a date . Kids got to have their sitter and TV time. We got some food at a nice restaurant and listened to some live bluegrass. Then, we went to the hardware store and bought a few necessities for racking wine and cultivating soil (I know we’re weird AND diverse). Got home and started getting the yard ready for the fall feed and reseed. The tomatoes were looking a little worse for wear after all the rain, so I decided to cull them all and collect what green tomatoes I had left for processing into relish. My kids helped out quite a lot with the harvesting.
I’m still waiting on a few kohlrabi and some sweet potatoes and even a pepper. Not quite time to plant the winter rye, but getting closer all the same.
While I was away, I bought 60 lb of honey for this years mead production. We’re doing 2x what we made last year. Got a tremendous deal from a wholesaler in PA. We’ll be putting that together this weekend. And just to make it a full day, we decided to rack the blueberry wine and get it ready for aging. I need the fermenter free anyway. Mrs. J had a lot of fun comparing the different sweetening ratios that we’re evaluating for the blueberry wine. We fermented it right to dryness (12% alc/vol), so we’ll need to sweeten just a bit before bottling. Looks like we’re going to have a pretty big wine year around here. By the time the mead is complete and the blueberry is bottled, we stand to have something like > 100 bottles of wine in our cellar from this year alone! I’m looking forward to next year’s competitions. We’ll be entering a few I’m sure.
Have a great weekend everyone!
May
26
Awards and Gardening Notes
My mead that I’d posted about earlier this year was recently awarded the bronze medal in the traditional mead category for the winemaker magazine international wine competition. We’re pretty excited! Now I’m in the process of narrowing down where I’ll source my honey from and attempt to improve on last years recipe. I simply cannot wait to get that new fermentation rolling along.
In other news, it’s been quite a busy time in my garden. All this wet weather has been really helping some of my plants and making other’s struggle. I certainly could probably grow champions next year during the spring.
I’ve decided to halt the potato box at it’s current height and see how it goes.I really want to have a good yield, but I don’t want to have the lower bed taters suffer. After some excellently warm weather yesterday and today, my cucumbers have finally come to life. The sweet potatoes are rallying and my newly mulched melon beds are doing much better. The grape vines have come to life and have started climbing. I can’t wait for the sunflowers and peas to start blooming in earnest.
Living in Maryland, we get a lot of very humid and hot days. I constructed a rain water collection system, but once the rain lets up I’m going to be harder pressed to use only rain water for my garden. I’m going to be looking into storing some of the city water in the barrel when it starts to get dry. I think that leaving the top off of the barrel will help to get rid of most of the chlorine (hopefully) before I have to use it on the garden.
The next big project that I’m looking to undertake is a sidepath from my front to my backyard that will help improve the drainage around my home as well as to minimize the mud during the wetter parts of the spring.
Anyone else doing fun things in their garden so far?
Mar
14
Honey and Experimental Design
Without apology, I am a man of varying interests. At any given moment, i’m thinking about doing or actively trying to do 15 different things of dissimilar pursuits. I like to work with my hands and I like working with living things and systems.
This weekend I built a rather large entertainment shelving cabinet center for the living room, then I bought manure for my raised garden beds, and 680 lbs of topsoil for my lawn, and 50 lbs of grass seed. My wife and I tilled up the entire back yard (essentially) and I turned all the soil in the garden beds over. We seeded and watered the lawn. We bought 191 lbs of beef from the local farmer and bought a new car seat for the baby Giles. We were pretty busy. It’s that busy action that makes me consider my time and my efforts. And in that vein, this year I decided to make absolutely sure that my mead recipe is top notch. And the only way to ensure success is to experiment.
In the fading moments of Sunday night, instead of just going to sleep like a normal person, I was preparing an experiment designed to evaluate the optimal ingredients necessary to improve on my mead recipe, last year’s foray is entered into the Vermont amateur national competition due to be judged next month. Working in the biotechnology field, you get a lot of exposure to statistical experimental design, the core idea of which is learning the most about a series of variables with the least number of experiments. Mead takes a LONG time to ferment and to be ready. It does not lend itself to “cook and look” approaches.
This is pretty important to me, because often times the ingredients I have around are either expensive or in short supply. Honey is an expensive material. I scour the internet for sales on this stuff, and with the Colony Collapse Disorder and Varroe Mites, the stuff is becoming even more expensive to work with. But oh man, does it make a fine fermented beverage!
So, now I have a 9 point fractional factorial experiment with a single center point brewing in my kitchen in 175 mL aliquot jelly jar fermenters. Each point has been varied for gravity, pH, and/or tannin concentration. Mrs. J has gone on the road to pick up some KV-116 yeasties for me so we can innoculate. And she has found us a supplier of honey through whom I can get 60 lbs of raw honey for roughly 200 dollars. If you’re interested, that is enough bee juice to make 2 x 12.5 gallons of Falling Stone Mead. In about 4 weeks, when the mini-primaries are finished, we’ll sample and decide what the master recipe is for this year, and we’ll have the results of the amateur wine competition.
Once that’s decided, I can give my garden the proper amount of attention.
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