There are always adjustments and plain fiddling about.  I've hit the twenty five gallon mark today with the next installment of metheglin and I am in a happy spot.  Half way to my goal and prior to June.  Whoo Hoo!

I've posted the process I currently use for a non heat method of metheglin production.  I do want to share what I did differently on this particular batch.

Robin, my wife and general empress of our domicile, apparently heard me mention a desire to get a mortar and pestle for grinding stuff. I am glad she pays attention to my ramblings as I apparently do not.  It did sound familiar, but for the life of me, I couldn't remember what I was talking about until today!  I used the mortar and pestle to coarse grind the cinnamon, allspice, and coriander.  I now remember thinking about doing this in order to free up some fresh flavor out of the spices.  It was a real treat to get that intense smell of the spice as I happily broke down the ingredients.  It was like walking into a spice shop and the smell is still in the air an hour later.  It almost has a winter holiday atmosphere around the house.

I also held off on adding the malo dextrose until after the boil of both the spices and the tea bags.  I am not sure of my reasoning, but I did take notes for future puzzlement.  Again, I filled the carboy to a about 5 3/4 gallon and added 12 1/2 pounds of honey.  After a healthy stirring, I actually did a front end reading and got a little over 11% which tickled me to no end as I will be adding another 2 1/2 pounds of honey as usual in about 2 weeks.  I then pitched the yeast, popped on the lid, and added the newborn batch to my lovely corner of metheglin.  Happy day and a delightful 40 minutes to complete.  The new wait begins.

Time to take Robin to work.  I intend to look after the bees on my return.  It is a bit cooler out (around 65 degrees) so I don't expect a great amount of hive activity, but the girls always surprise me.  I have been getting more daring and re-filled the feeders yesterday without gloves or veil.  I think I heard a few bees snickering at my nervousness.  They were good though and didn't even bother with a few fly-bys around my head.

Until next post,  enjoy your day as life is out there!

I suspect that I am a creature bound to impatience.  I couldn't wait until the end of the month to bottle.  Sigh.  Once headed into this direction, I was, of course, bound to rotate my stock.  On the good note, I was able to bottle a total of twenty-four 750 ml bottles out of the 5 gallon carboy I use at the tail end.  I was very happy about this.  I used the PrivatE PreservE gas blanket on each  of the bottles as I corked them up.  I spritzed 2 or 3 short bursts of the canister in the neck of the bottle just before I inserted the cork.

Here is the second round of bottling:

Just to the right of the bottles is the canister of PrivatE PreservE.  I put the cork in the corker, placed it over the top of the bottle and set it back just a hair so that I could put the tube of the PrivatE PreservE into the neck of the bottle and shoot in a bit of gas.  Then I quickly inserted the cork.  In the background to the right, you can see the pretty much emptied carboy.

I took one of the bottles outside and put it on a fence post:

I thought it looked pretty good and am happy with the flavor at the moment.  It has a noticeable spice to it.  It will take a few more months for the flavor to peak and I hope I can wait on this...

On to the round robin of moving fluid around.  I transferred contents around until I had my plastic carboy emptied.  Here is a shot of the carboys being racked off and a shot of the remaining three carboys with the empty plastic one in the front.  Time to get more honey...

   

Again, not very clear.  I think I am going to have to use Robin's camera rather than my phone.  Ah well...it looks much better in real life.  Perhaps it it simply my eyes.  I don't use my glasses often enough and maybe the pictures are really clear?  I know better though.

I did add more syrup to the bees today.  They are getting a bit more brazen about letting me know that while they like the delivery, they could do without the man about.  I may need to start smoking them just a bit in the near future.  

It is beautiful outside right now but it is evening and I need to get ready for my weekend of night shift.  Take care, enjoy the weekend and life that is out there.

Well, it's been about 10 days since I perked up a new batch of metheglin and I decided to add another 2 1/2 pounds of honey and another tablespoon each of Fermaid K and yeast energizer.  Not anything really interesting to look at as far as taking a picture as it looks the same as the carboy a week and a half ago other than the level is up a bit more.  It is now at about 6 3/4 gallon which is about perfect for my purposes.  This has produced a bit more bubbles in the air trap so I am happy.  Ah, okay, here's a gratuitous shot:

 

Hmmm....a little fuzzy.  There is a nice bit of foam off the top as I stirred up the batch really well after adding the honey and the other two items.  I did put in just a bit of hot water in the honey jug on the right to get the last of the honey out.  If you do that and you swish it around, be careful: it will expand quickly and pop the top.  I kept the lid partially closed while I shook it and the air pushed out all right.

After I added the ingredients, I replaced the lid and the air trap and back to its corner it went.

It was a really pretty day out so I decided to go out and pester the bees.  The day prior, I had peeked in the top and noticed that the sugar water was empty.  It was kind of cold out so I thought to wait a day and I'm glad I did.  The sun is out as well as the girls.  At least a lot of them are out making their rounds.  There should only be a few thousand of them in the boxes!  I mixed up a gallon of sugar water, grabbed my gear and went out to the bee dormitory.

I pulled the pint jar feeders and washed them out as they appeared a bit gummy inside.  Here are the jars.  I show them off as they are antiques and quite a pretty blue.  The bees don't concern themselves too much with the flair, but I hope it is the vibe of coolness that is imparted on them:

I wish I had saved the pic of the hive opened.  Changes are almost a daily thing inside a hive.  It is amazing to see how much of the comb has been developed in the upper tier.  There are a lot more larva baking in the cells inside.  I've noticed quite a fair of orientation flights of new bees outside the hive in the afternoon.  I did not see the queen today, but she is very busy inside.

Speaking of queens, Robin laid down the law today.  She dragged over a bunch of corkscrew willow branches from the neighbor lady across the street a couple weeks back.  I swear that lady was snickering when she saw my face.  Here I am trying to get rid of branches and my lovely bride is bring over the neighbor's!  Well, I started grousing about those branches being in the way of the lawnmower today and Robin caught me off guard by asking me what I wanted to do with them...  I will say in my defense that I am working nights and was not at my full mental capacity and my spidey sense did not trigger.  I think I mentioned burning them or something and quickly realized this was not the correct response when I saw HER face.

We got into a zesty conversation about projects and the next thing I know is that we are attaching these branches to the front fence line so that her Malabar spinach and other climbing plants will have a place to go.  It may sound a bit awful in theory and I grumbled through the whole process, but it does look quite pretty.  Tomorrow, I'll see if I can get a decent shot of it and add it to this post. (Added-here is a pic of the fence line:)

After all was said and done, we went on a bike ride with my son Conor this evening.  There are a few nesting Killdeer around here that I was anxious to check on.  They are beautiful birds that have cute pilot helmets on and I just love to see them darting about.  Just up the street we saw that two nests had hatched and tiny Killdeer were speeding about the neighbor's lawns.  What a nice end to a pretty great day.

That's  it for this evening.  I hope your day ends on a high note as well.

It's almost a week since I started my newest batch.  I keep an occasional eye on the batch as well as my other containers.  To bide my time, I break out my resource books now and then and take a peek online for items I can find on mead and production.  I ran into a little meadery back east.  It is called The Saphouse Meadery and is a little production shop that is well worth looking at.  Here is the blog link which will get you to their other sections: http://saphousemeadery.com/Blogs.php The big downside to this wonderful mead making joint is that it does not appear that they ship to Washington State at this time!  I am going to shoot them a quick note to advise them that there are a few people holed up on the west coast that might want to sample their wares.

A really nice part of the blog is that these folks recently started their shop and have included some of their notes on how they went about doing it as well as providing some cool shots of their outfit.  They used a lot of reclaimed items and the business is a tidy little affair that has panache.  A place worth envy and I am a bit green over what they have accomplished.  I'll be keeping an eye on this site.

I've been doing some reading up on the aging process of my mead and it must have tickled one of my grey cells as to why I have gone over to the non-heating method of brewing.  From what I have read, the non-heat method becomes more drinkable in less time than the heated counterpart.  In around 6 months, you should be able to get some of the tasty goodness out of your brew and most efforts really come out within a year.

It is not my aim to put out something really fast, rather it is my personal goal to find a recipe that treats the honey as delicately as I am able and to keep it from bringing out any harsh resiny tastes that I feel boiling would cause.

Another item I noticed was mention of Ph balance.  I am not sure at the moment if I even want to mess with this at this time, but for later consistency I may start keeping notes.  The Ph balance can help with the brewing process from what I see and it seems to be dependent on the type of honey being used.  I am currently sticking with clover honey but up here, there is an abundance of blackberry honey that is actually a bit less expensive (today) than clover.

Okay, the root cellar: Robin and I have talked this over several times.  The thought of moving a mass of dirt around is not my idea of the most fun I can have over a couple weeks, but I am beginning to be resigned to the fact that if I want an inexpensive temperature controlled area, I am going to have to break out my shovel and pick.  My plan is to start moving stuff out of the area we have chosen and then I will start with my dirt mining operation.

The floor may be dirt for the time being, but I am pretty sure the walls will be cinder block with either a stair at one end or a ladder if we use a floor above.  The spot is in a section of our RV barn so I think a floor for a roof is the way to go.  If all goes to plan, the operation should start in a week or so and I will post some pics of the dig.

Just as an FYI, our bees are moving upstairs in their hive.  The combs are being drawn out and there is honey being stored there as well.  This is an excellent sign and there is a lot more larva in the hive.  With Robin planting stuff all over, we should have a lot of food for the bees to snack on as well.


And finally, yesterday, after a brief downpour, we got a beautiful rainbow:

Yes, there is a hint of a double-rainbow.  What can it mean???  You can't see it from the picture, but this one had some of the most brilliant green that I have seen on a rainbow to date.  Even a rainy day have something of interest.

It's Thursday morning around 11 am in this neck of the woods.  I finally got around to doing up another batch of Metheglin bringing me up to my 20 gallon mark.  I took a bunch of pictures of me muddling around and took my usual notes (3 x 5 card--more than that and my brain gets too busy).  I've written about what I do and here it is in the actual process.  It took me less than 30 to 40 minutes or so to do this.

I started off by gathering my spices, honey, and equipment.  A quick cleaning of my plastic carboy and other utensils. I then measured out my spices:

The upper left bowl has 2 teaspoons of coriander seeds.  Proceeding clockwise, there is 4 teaspoons of cloves, 2 teaspoons of allspice, 1/2 nutmeg (shaved--the rasp is to the right), 4 cinnamon sticks, and 4 teabags of Earl Grey and 4 teabags of black tea.  I put the first five ingredients in a mesh bag:

 Then put it to a boil for 5 minutes.  The pot is about 3/4 filled and holds about a half gallon of water when filled.  After 5 minutes on the boil, I added the teabags which were knotted together and added 8 tablespoons of malodextrin to the mix and continued the boil for 5 more minutes:

 

 While the mix was boiling, I took the time to fill the plastic carboy with 5 gallons of lukewarm water and also started hydrating my yeast:

The yeast is the Lalvin EC-1118 that I am currently using on all my Metheglin.  This, again, is a personal preference and I am not sure at this time on the specifics on the tail end beyond what is written in the sources I use.  The Metheglin tastes pretty good when I drink it and that may be the final say so for me.

After 10 minutes on the boil, I pulled out the mesh bag and the tea bags.  I filled up the pot to the top and set it aside:

Er...those are brownies to the right.  My superior, Robin, maintains her peak 'tude with occasional intake of chocolatey goodness in various forms.  It makes life very good indeed and she allows me an eighth or so of the brownie pie now and then.  Time to add 12 or so pounds of honey to the water.  You may notice that honey does not want to leave completely out of the containers.  I add the above spice mix to each container and swish it around.  The hot spice mix will dilute and heat up the remaining honey and pour pretty well:

 

I only used half of the third container as each container was 5 pounds of honey.  I'll add the remaining 2 1/2 pounds to the mix in a week or so when the perk goes down a bit. Total amount in the carboy now is a little over 6 gallons. This will work out on the tail end when I transfer it to a glass carboy and rack off the lees to ensure it is filled to the top of the glass one.

 

Once the honey and spices were added to the carboy, I stirred up the contents for several minutes to get a good blending.  The yeast had about 12 to 15 minutes to re-hydrate in the meantime and it was time to pitch this into the carboy:

Once pitched in, I stirred the mix for about 3 minutes and then some to get the yeast well stirred in.  I put the lid on and added an air trap:

And added it to my growing collection. I'll wait a couple hours to see if the mix starts perking.  Once it does, I will add Fermaid-K and yeast nutrient that has been hydrated to the batch to get things going better.  This seems to help the honey ferment more gustily and I will repeat this in a few weeks when I add more honey to the carboy.  In the background are my other batches.  The left is still fining.  The middle is the second oldest and looks like my oldest batch done up in January on the right.  I'm having thoughts on whether to use the Sparkaloid on my batches now as the older one has almost no lees and has been clear for almost a month.  I may just bottle the contents when I get ready to transfer junior in the front to a glass carboy in a month or so.

I have heard that some folks like their carboys wrapped in a dark cloth to keep light off of the works.  This corner you see stays darkened and I don't wrap mine at this point, but it would probably be a good idea to do that if it weren't in the location I use.

Oh!  A quick blurb on PrivatE PreservE:  Yep, that is how it is spelled on the label.  This is an inert gas aerosol that helps preserve wine and is the same gasses used to keep air off of wine at wineries.  I picked up a can on a wine tour last weekend.  I got the can for $5.00 but the price at other wineries went up as high as $14.00.  There is a web-site on the can: www.wineenthusiast.com that you should be able to go to to get yourself some if you want to try it out.  I am going to give it a whirl on my carboys if the level lowers during racking and also use it in my bottling.  I'll let you know the results when I can.

On a side note, Yesterday we had the dump of dumps of rain!  Yakima does not get a great bounty of rain like the cities on the Washington coast, but we got a months worth of rain in a day according to our local news.  That dump was over and done in about 20 minutes or so and it was impressive!  The rest of the day was mild.  I will need to check on our bees to see how they weathered the storm, but will wait a day or so for them to sort it out on their end.  I don't want to open up their home while they are hunkered down inside.

Robin wants to go and play outside for a bit as she has hit the perfect brownie moment.  Duty calls as does nature.  See you soon folks!