I Finally got around to bottling my two 2+ year old dry meads. That is the nice thing about mead, it needs time to age before it’s really ready. Ok, that’s also the bad thing about it, but as long as you have enough beer around you should be able to just forget about it for a year… or more.

These two Canola honey meads were fermented with Wyeast Bordeaux and Kitzinger Tokaj. Both ended around 0.990 (coming down from almost 1.080), are very clear and are almost colorless. They are tasting nice but lacking something. I am starting to think that the drier a mead ends up, the more it needs some tannins from oak aging. Unfortunately neither of these received any oak. Lesson learned.

I’ll do a grand mead tasting somewhere in the future but right now I’ll just say that I quite like the character I am getting from the Tokaj yeast. I wonder what this would do in combination with some bugs in a sour beer? Perhaps a good candidate for a Test Pilot brew.

I also racked over my most recent mead. This Linden blossom mead marked my first attempt at a sweet mead. I took the approach of making a massive mead in hopes that the yeast would reach their alcohol tolerance and just give up, leaving behind unfermented sugars. Unfortunately the Kitzinger Bordeaux yeast took it down to 1.005 already and I expect that it will end even lower. So we’ll be looking at a massive 17%ABV dry mead!?! Oh well. I racked half of this mead onto Noorderkrieken (sour cherries) and the other half will be getting an addition of chipotle chilis in a couple of months. Then part of those two will be blended into an unexpectedly dry and boozy cherry-chipotle mead. Looking forward to that one!