Backsweetening Joe's Ancient Orange

I backsweetened Mead No. 4 and I made it more complicated than it needed to by ensuring everything was properly cleaned and sanitized. It's incredibly difficult to find large enough tubs cheaply that I can lay my racking cane in the tub without it sticking up, so everything just seemed more of a problem today when cleaning my utensils.

Then, when racking from the carboy to the one gallon pitcher, the hose came out and poured a quantity on the floor. Of course. I forgot the rule to put the container you're racking into into a catch basin of sorts just in case something like that happens.

In the end, I had to add twice as much honey as I thought I was going to need. According to my calculator, it should have taken slightly less than half a cup of honey to raise the gravity to 1.020, but it ended up taking a full cup to do so. I'll be searching for why that was.

The taste of the mead isn't terrific, though it's not bad. I really need to pay more attention to my technique, though this was one of my first meads and I was experimenting. I'll never use dehydrated orange slices again, however.

Mead updates

With my new meads I'm brewing now, starting with a base mead and then using the secondary to flavor them, I'm looking forward to seeing how it turns out. However, I think my next mead will be using fruit in the primary and secondary as I'll be following a recipe from Ken Schramm from his book.

My second batch of hard apple cider seems to have come to an end of its fermentation, or is close to it. After degassing it daily for a week, the balloon airlock isn't standing up anymore so it may be time to set it aside for aging. I think I need to rack it first, then do that.

The first base mead I made, No. 15, also seems to be winding down fermentation, while No. 17 is still going along. Today or tomorrow is the last day that I'll be degassing it.From then on only having one mead a week to degas will be easier. I would like to automate the process so I want to see if I can build something to do that using the small spray paint compress I have.