wacky1980

it's got real good color. should clear up once it stops churning and bubbling. i'm excited for you.

i can't swallow raw oysters. i've tried, repeatedly, and my gag reflex kicks in and it turns into a big embarrassing moment. so raw oysters? never again.

are you letting it rest in the carboy for the full 6? if you can wiggle a wine thief through the bung (i love brewing terminology), you could draw up a little sample without exposing the rest of the batch to atmosphere. sample it at 1mo, 2mo, etc, until you're satisfied with it. if it tastes like absolute sour shit at 1mo, it's safe to say it's bad and you can dump it and start over. but if it just tastes "green" i.e. flavors are there but still out of balance, you're probably on the right path. i guess i need to disclaimer this a bit. i'm making assumptions that mead aging is similar enough to beer aging that these methods are applicable for both. if you have books to read, defer to them. online advice though, it's as reliable as you can imagine in many cases.

if you're using new gear, "visibly clean" plus a sanitization round is plenty. it's when you're using older gear that may have microscopic pits/scratches for shit to hide out, when you need to beef up your cleaning methods. if you made a reasonable effort to clean/sanitize, you'll be fine. i've brewed probably ~100 batches of beer, sometimes getting a little drunk and sloppy by the end of the brew, and still never managed to infect a batch. crap, i probably just jinxed myself.

i've gone both routes, with and without nutrient. imo, dry yeast doesn't seem to benefit in a significant way from using it. ymmv of course, and i rarely brew the same recipe with single variable changes, but i usually hit my marks and that's my big measure of yeast performance. i would assume beer isn't quite as prone to infection as mead, because hops are a natural antimicrobial. but as long as your gear was cleaned ~very thoroughly~ and you're not letting atmosphere hit your product once it enters the fermenter, infection is relatively rare. the main concern is what's being introduced on the fruit, but again, if it's cleaned up very well beforehand, you'll probably be fine.

depending on how long you're seeing active fermentation, you can probably rack to secondary off-schedule. my rule of thumb (for beer) is to wait until after primary fermentation ceases (no bubbles, liquid isn't circulating, yeast has visibly settled out) and then give the yeast a few more days to "clean up" before racking. moving to secondary gets your mead off the yeast and solids that settled out during primary, which can improve clarity and flavor. if you rack too early, you'll bring some yeast and solids to your secondary vessel that will eventually settle out, which may prompt you to want a third racking for extra clarity. i don't know about that yeast strain, but i would assume 10-14 days at a minimum before it has finished up its primary phase.

that's getting better around here, but still not great. i have to drive 45 minutes to find the two nearest breweries. but that's a lot better than a year ago, when it took upwards of 75 minutes to reach one. the licensing to become a brewery/brewpub is tedious, but not terribly complex. as soon as we have a nearby space to build a small brewing rig and processing area, it's on.

there's not a homebrew shop within 75 miles of here, so i do most of my shopping online. besides amazon, i frequent a couple sites that have decent pricing if you can wait up to a week for your equipment/supplies. morebeer.com ritebrew.com homebrewing.org

i'm not well-studied on mead methods, but it's generally similar to brewing beer once it's in the fermenter. i've had some homebrew meads that were straight out of the fermenter and they tended to be a little wild. aging beer allows the flavors to mingle and develop complexity through some natural chemical reactions over time, so i would assume the same to be true with a good aged mead. 6 months of aging sounds appropriate, and i wish you good luck on your first brew. i think i'm gonna be making some more beers very soon myself. i was just gifted 50lb of grain to brew up, and i have a few lb of hops in the freezer that are probably getting close to aging out of usefulness. and my grain mill just showed up on the truck yesterday, so i no longer have to order grains pre-milled (opens up a lot of options for ingredients, and you get a fresher-tasting product when you mill it right before dough-in). i'm keeping the next couple brews simple, single-malt pale ales with just one or two hop varieties. time to start really building knowledge on hop characteristics. also trying to read up on water chemistry, and how to get the perfect mix of ph, alkalinity, and hardness for each style. never thought i'd need to flex those chemistry muscles again, but here we are.

i found a place that sells non-gmo, raw, organic, pesticide-free african multi-floral honey for relatively cheap (made a thread about it in that other folder). it would get pricey to make mead from that stuff though. you can get a 60# bucket of domestic raw honey for <$200, which is enough to do like 20 gallons of mead. what temp are you fermenting at? iirc, mead yeast likes to eat at a little below room temp. upper-midwest basements are probably perfect for it.

i think it was some random thing on angelfire back in like 1999. don't remember what it was called.

i don't delete shit. it's never really gone anyways, so the way i see it is, why would i want to be the only one to give up access to my own shit?

spending all weekend gathering data and packaging it into a grant application seems like a pretty valid use of your time. til the application is declined, anyways.

sours are generally lower ABV, but when combined with / adapted from other recipes (in this case, the victory golden monkey tripel as a base), you get the best of both worlds. that blackberry felix is around 9% iirc, and probably the most sour + flavorful beer i've found yet.

last sour i had that i really liked was either blackberry felix from new belgium, or lindeman's framboise. yum.

never pegged you as a sour guy, but that's a great one and i'm jealous.

i'm finding it very difficult to not tell everyone to fuck right off a cliff today.

i made a handful of prototypes, based solely on my own understanding of what constitutes a well-shaped cover. not using a pattern, just kinda cutting and sewing. got out my old kenworth 1946 zig-zag machine and everything. they're not great, but they cover the nose and mouth and have a little pouch for a pm2.5 filter. i'm gonna turn out as many as my spare t-shirt stock will allow for, or until i run out of patience for the process. i'm also halfway through taking down a hard maple beside the house. had to hire someone with a bucket truck, because the tree is ~80' tall and between my house and the neighbors. i'm staying on the ground, running a saw to cut the dropped pieces, ranking up the stuff that's big enough to burn in a furnace/pit, and hauling off the rest in the back of my truck. we would have finished yesterday, but the bucket truck sprang a hydraulic leak and had to shut down about an hour from being finished. might try to get the rest of it on the ground tomorrow after work.

rlytho, my boys watch a lot of junk-ass youtube videos that use flipaclip. i think it's freemium.

mspaint

quotes came back today. $1300 to fix the draft cooler, $1500 for the bottle cooler. i can get a new draft cooler with 2x capacity for $3000 (off-brand but whatever). the bottle cooler, same off-brand, for $1800. fuck me. this is not how i envisioned blowing our reserve fund while we're shut down. but if we don't have working coolers, there's not much of a point in re-opening. fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck me.

two fucking coolers at the bar went down last week...while we're shut down. the draft beer cooler has a fried compressor, which will require replacement and may run upwards of $1000 after labor. a bottle cooler decided it will no longer hold a charge. so they're testing it as i type this to see if they can find the leak. if they can, they might be able to fix it. if they can't, the whole thing is screwed. didn't really want to be spending $3-4k on refrigeration while also not doing any sales for 6 weeks, but here we are. thanks, corona.

kinda wishing i was stuck at home today. trying to get around at the bank with this bum foot is proving pretty difficult...and explaining the limp to every person i pass in the hall, is getting old. and now i have to go to the clinic when i leave work at 4 for a tetanus shot and antibiotic rx. you gotta get a look at that rusty nail though.

the lightning has started. and it just got dark af. street lights are back on now. gonna be a good day, skeeter.

aren't "they" saying that tornado alley is shifting east from ks/neb and into iowa/mo/il? because we needed more severe weather than we already get.