Chevette Girl

[Classick]

since joining 6 months ago i have read quite a few of your posts in various topics now heres one to call you out

somewhere it was stated you have over 100gallons of different brews a brewing.
I also know you have an extensive to-do-list.

So heres a topic pertaining to you. Whats your favorite mead thus far? How many actual meads are you doing and have done. I'd also like to know how much you've learned in your JAOMv experimenting as i know your great in remembering your science education.

[Chevette Girl]

Always surprising to see a post with my name on it, even more of one when it's a good thing

I think I tallied it up in another thread but I'm gonna go make my spreadsheet do it for me and I'll post again when I'm done... I generally have between 40 and 60 gallons on the go at any one time but some of them are really in for the long haul when it comes to aging, like this one, and that damned banana wine that refuses to clear... Current totals are 277 gallons, 141 batches, since 2004 when I started.

Favourites? Well, I've really only made two traditionals, and I really liked them. Golden honey with a little bit of buckwheat, finished around 1.010-1.015. That's a sweetness level I seem to like. Why haven't I made more? Good question. Probably a case of "been there, done that" and there's always a new exciting fruit ready to harvest or on sale at the produce store that calls my name louder than the traditional does.

The Cleaning Out The Freezer Rosé is fabulous already, and at some point I'm probably going to try to recreate it, I've probably got most of the same stuff in the freezer.

My favourite JAO variation is blackberry. I'll be starting another one soon but I did all my previous batches before becoming a member here, it's pretty basic - don't use the orange, don't use the clove, cinnamon is optional (read: awesome both ways), use 12 oz of blackberries instead of the orange. Mush the berries by whatever means necessary, leave them in there till they sink, it clears up like any other JAO.

My second favourite JAO variation is ornamental crabapple. About a dozen of the little cranberry-sized apples instead of the orange, spices optional. The ones I get have dark purple juice but so far it's never transferred to the must, it comes out looking like a traditional.

The lemon-date JAO was also pretty good, I used a lemon (zest and fruit only) instead of an orange and 10 chopped dates instead of raisins.

What I have learned about JAO: the two important factors are the honey ratio (3.5 lb per gallon) and the use of bread yeast. Anything that matches these criteria, I count as a JAO variation. I also discovered that if I drink JAO where the citrus pith has been left in, I get heartburn, so now I zest the citrus and use that along with the fruit or the juice.

I really like how my crabapple cysers come out, every year or two there's a really good crabapple crop and I do like it made with honey. A lot of the other mels I've made, I can't really tell they had honey when I drink the finished product, so I often make just wine instead because sugar is so much cheaper than honey.

My to-do list has its own thread too somewhere in The Hive, not a whole lot has been added to it but every now and then I get around to adding anything interesting that has come up since.

I actually have a TERRIBLE memory, this is why I write everything down. I started my log book with my first batch and always do my best to keep detailled notes about everything I do. Even if I can't read my own writing some days

[Chevette Girl]

Final tally... of 141 batches,

45 were wines made with fruits other than grapes
11 wine kits (mostly grape wines, one sherry, one ice-style)
11 are mead (traditional, show or maple)
29 are JAO or variants
29 are melomels of various types, often second runs with once-fermented fruit bags
6 metheglyns
2 beers (brew in a bottle, yes, I cheated)
1 braggot (also cheated by using brew in a bottle wort)
1 cider
1 hydromel
1 pyment
3 failures

And I'm not at this point going to figure out how many gallons of what. I could, it would be easy, but I really don't care that much

[ChadK]

Originally Posted by Chevette Girl

3 failures

All those, and that's all I'm curious about.

[Chevette Girl]

Oh, sure. You wanna know the dirt, do you...

The first two were trying to ferment Welch's frozen Raspberry Concentrate. Which I later determined has potassium sorbate in it. And knowing what I now know, I think I know how I'd get it to work, but I've since found a much better place for it - make a 5-gal batch of kit wine, stabilize it when it's done, then add two cans of the concentrate, let it settle out, bottle. It's like using a wine kit's fruit pack, only this one actually HAD met a real raspberry and cost $2 instead of $20 more than the base wine kit... Summerberry wine

The third was some concord grapes a friend had grown and given me, and I forgot about them in primary for a couple of months, by the time remembered there actually WAS something in that bucket, it was pretty dreadful... I will give anything a chance if I think it can be salvaged (ie, the 2004 pucker-puss, link below), but there was no saving this, two drops of it numbed my tongue and made me gag so I poured it down the drain.

[Classick]

Now i know i want to be like you lol
Naw seriously tho thats alot of drinking there
Reason for calling you out is the amount of multi variants youve done
had me wondering if you broke it down to a science
Ive got a few more brewlogs and threads to read on the subject
And im sure a few failures as well but i like the idea of a quick mead
But would like to see more recipes and/or help develop them

[Chevette Girl]

The sad thing is I don't drink much, since my alcohol tolerance now exceeds my hangover tolerance... Between that and most of my martial arts classes being held in the evenings when I would otherwise consider sitting down with a glass of something tasty, we're lucky to kill a bottle a week, even using some of the not so great stuff in cooking... I've got over 350 bottles in storage at the moment, the spreadsheet even tells me how many are on which shelf (after I went looking for something and couldn't find it, I did a full inventory, which I now try to keep updated and review yearly when I unpack and repack the wine corner every spring). I don't have much space and have to share some of it with my husband and our huge collection of board games, so I have to keep it organized...

But yeah, I totally fell in love with the JAO-based stuff, and since I like sweet meads and so do most of my friends, it's what's moved the quickest, it also doesn't seem to go off from sitting around in a 3/4 empty bottle either. There's a whole thread around somewhere detailing all the different things people have tried with that recipe.

[akueck]

Gotta admit, I was worried this thread was going to be something like "Has anyone heard from CG? She's disappeared!!" It was worrisome. We also got a phone call from my brother-in-law yesterday: "Call me when you get this, it's important." We thought someone was in the hospital or dead. Not a good day yesterday for cryptic messages. [Turns out he just got engaged. Really the wrong message to leave! ]

So, on a happier note, you've got that many bottles lying around? Where the heck do you put them all? Our new pantry/beer closet is pretty empty right now. Also I find drinking around lunch is nice; you're un-tipsy long before evening activities.

[caffeine211]

Originally Posted by akueck

Also I find drinking around lunch is nice; you're un-tipsy long before evening activities.

Plus it makes doing laundry somewhat bearable...

[Chevette Girl]

Originally Posted by caffeine211

Plus it makes doing laundry somewhat bearable...

You have a point...

One of my friends from high school does her housecleaning on Friday afternoons - she puts on music, cracks open a bottle of wine... Three hours later the bottle's empty but the house is clean...

[Soyala_Amaya]

http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-tips-d...while-at-work/

[Altricious]

Originally Posted by Soyala_Amaya

http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-tips-d...while-at-work/

I'm the boss, so I can drink at work if I want!

[Chevette Girl]

Wow, that article's pretty terrible... please tell me nobody takes that seriously and drinks all day and drives home...

I could never have drunk at work, I didn't even drink much at our yearly golf day (or as I liked to refer to it, "legalized drinking and driving", I love golf carts), when I have a few, the filters come off and I am honest. Brutally, painfully, completely honest. Oh, and the polite veneer is gone. Thinks nobody I worked with ever knew: I can out-belch anyone I've ever met except my brother, and I can out-spit even him. I'm so terribly ladlylike, I know.

Like if my boss had asked me on Golf Day (or if I drank at the office) how he could motivate me, and why my productivity and happiness level had suddenly gone up that one year (two questions he actually posed during my yearly reviews), I might actually have told him, to motivate me, give me more paid vacation time or let me go home early, I don't want to work myself to death the way my dad did and the way you very likely will, and the reason my productivity and happiness went up is I stopped caring about pleasing you and trying to do things your way, and just did my damn job without caring what you thought.

It's never a good thing to tell your boss you've reached the "f***-it" point. Although I suspect he eventually figured that out, he let me go a couple years later when he finally realized I wasn't doing thing his way and hadn't been for a while. Which was actually pretty awesome after I got over the initial shock.