Mead Making

By the way, in all honesty I should tell you our homemade beer turned out pretty terrible.  It was the "kit" beer sold by Mr. Beer, which comes with a can of ingredients to pour into the water and which is, as the Husband put it, "microwave dinner brewing".  The beer tastes, again as the Husband put it, like "beer flavored seltzer".

But the mead's still turning out good, though.

This is what happens when you get the Husband on board with something: total buy-in.

A five-gallon glass carboy, if you're wondering.  I keep thinking someone will see it through a window and think we're cooking meth.  (We're not.  It's honey, water, yeast, and fruit.)

All that's left of our first batch, the one I brewed in a spring-water jug.

(By the way have I mentioned I love my CSA? "CSA" is Community Supported Agriculture, a fancy word for a farmer who delivers you vegetables.  Mine also brings a dozen eggs from her chickens that get to get out and scratch.  Her name is Georgiaberry.  How awesome is that?)

Anyway, back to the mead.  The one on the left is orange flavored (kinda, you don't really taste the orange) and the one on the left is the strawberry, which we tasted although it's not quite done yet.  It's already really good.  I like it better than the orange, although the Husband says it's a bit sweet for him.

This is what the Chickabiddies were doing while we were siphoning things from one carboy to another.  Littleman was sacked out on our bed (the better to keep him asleep while brother and sister flail and fight going to bed on the other side of the house).

He had a doctor's appointment this morning and weighs 14 pounds.  He's a chunk.  Also he thinks he can sit up.  He turned 4 months old today.

Buddy, sacked out on his own bed,which is lined with pillows because Bud flops a LOT during the night and frequently ends up at the other end of the bed entirely.  Night before last we got up to find him snuggled into his sister's bed, both of them happy as clams.

Miss Boo, who sweats like a lumberjack when she sleeps, even if it isn't 100 degrees.  (That's where our temperature has been for the last few days, and the newspaper's been running editorials about heat exhaustion.  Yikes.  I'm so thankful for the AC.)

So you see we planned our mead-related activities to cooincide with all three kids being asleep.  That's how we  have to roll in this house.

Also randomly, I don't think I mentioned I love my new china cabinet.  It's awesome.

The Husband bought this bucket to ferment in, feeling my spring-water jugs were piddly and unprofessional. (My response: but they only cost 88 cents.)

The Husband insisted on taking my picture while the siphoning went on.  Because this took ten minutes, I was ok with that.

The siphon.  Get the shorter length of hose if you order one.  We should have.

Bottling the (almost) finished orange mead from the last batch--our new batch is that cloudy stuff to the left.  It looks better before you drink it, though.

The still-clarifying strawberry mead, in bottles.

Tasting it... it's sort of like alcoholic, seedless strawberry jelly, but the consistency of wine of course.  Not bad.  Will be better after another few weeks, though.

This shot was the Husband's idea.  He likes symmetry.  That half-full bottle of strawberry bugged him, but our gallon didn't make quite so much as with the orange because a lot of it was taken up with strawberry puree.

Now the kids are playing with every bit of tupperware in the house, so perhaps I should wrangle some school for them.

Cheers,

Breanna