Making mead with the man

Who drinks mead?

Me and Jake, apparently.

And we don’t even play Dungeons & Dragons.

About six months ago, Jake got a bee in his baseball cap to make this medieval-era wine made entirely of honey. Some of his clients raise bees, and were kind enough to give him 14 pounds plus 5 gallons of the bees’ output. I wish we could have used some of it for culinary creations we already know are drinkable/edible, but  my request – alas – was rejected by mine lorde of the manor, trewly.

Mead consists of three ingredients: honey, water and yeast. To be called mead, it must contain at least 51 percent honey. I had a taste of it last night, and I’d say that’s about accurate. It’s a sweet, sweet wine.

We’ve already been fermenting the mead in a carboy for the past 6 months. Last night, it was time to transfer the beverage to bottles, seal them up and allow it to ferment for another 6 months. (Making wine takes considerably longer than making beer, which only takes a month or so.)

Jake has been regular visitor to our local recycling plant as of late to collect empty wine bottles. I can just picture my husband climbing inside the massive trailer containers filled with empty beer and wine bottles of every color and condition, scouring through piles of broken glass, looking for survivors that don’t contain any cigarette butts or spittles of the chewing tobacco at the bottom. (Blugh. This is one task I let him do all on his own.)

We now must have 200 empty used bottles of Fetzer and Yellow Tail in our back room. He brings them home, laboriously scrapes the labels off each one using carpentry tools and hot water, then sterilizes the bottles in a solution of bleach and iodine. Then he calls in his bottling wench (me), gives her a cookie to keep her quiet, and tells her fill 50 bottles with Beowulf’s nectar.

After I had finished filling the bottles with mead, Jake inserted a cork in each one, a surprisingly labor-intensive task that requires a special corking device that makes a high-pitched, anguished squeezing noise when the cork is forced into the bottle that reminded me of what a chicken might sound like when squeezed to death. It made the hair on the back of my neck stand on end.

After we had corked all the bottles, we stored them on their sides — they have to be laid on their sides for some reason — and allow them to finish their fermentation, which will be complete six months hence.

So I’ll probably be doing a reading of Chaucer at my house sometime in March.

Tagged as: mead