Wait for it.........

Unlike us, the mead is aging gracefully

Fate goes ever as fate must.

--Beowulf - Line 455

With two batches of mead started, we settle in to wait. And wait.  And waaaaaaaait.  Mead takes a long time by all accounts, which is why we are planning to keep starting batches as soon as we have a free ale pail to start fermenting in.  We may, in fact need more ale pails.  Or car wash buckets with trash bags taped over the top.  

We should be able to rack (that's siphon for those of you not up on the secret lingo of bootleggers homebrewers) the first batch from the ale pail to the carboy in a few more weeks, once the initial fermentation is mostly complete.  Once it is in the carboy though, we are talking about another several months at least before this stuff is at anything like what it is supposed to be.  Some of these crazy characters have aged batches for years.  I'm pretty sure that as soon as ours is remotely drinkable we'll be breaking out the two-story mead bong, setting up the table for mead-pong, and generally partying like it's 1999.  

If we were relying only on our own brewing capabilities, we would have to do our waiting sober.  That would be unconscionable.  Fortunately, some of our old friends Mr.J. Beam, the intrepid Captain Morgan, and British gin-pimp Tony Sinclair have a decades-long head start on us when it comes to creating intoxicating concoctions.  So we'll be attempting to reduce their supplies substantially, while our own supplies are, in effect, increasing.  

In the meantime we're dreaming up newer, more excellent things to do with our mead.  Should we age it in oak casks (that picture up there isn't just for show, I can totally get one) for a while?  Take a gallon and freeze off the water, making some kind of high octane viking-shot?  What kind of bottling apparatus will we need?  Submit your comments so that we can laugh at them consider them as our mead ferments, the gears of fate grind onward, and the serpents gnaw at the roots of Yggdrasil.

-Ben "The Berserker" Rooney