Oh yeah... meade!

Just remembered: the question was asked in comments "what do I classify my homebrew as?". And I forgot to answer...

I don't classify "it", as "it" is actually a "many". I do both a dry and sweet straight meade (meaning there's only honey, water, and yeast). I also do several varieties of mellomel (meaning there's fruit in the mix): to date, I've done plum and strawberry, with plans to add peach, cherry, an anything else that sounds good.

Problem with how I do a mellomel is, I don't just add fruit juice: I mix a LARGE amount of pureed fruit into the must (which is the concoction you first create, and start fermenting). I let that sit for a couple weeks, then strain out the fruit pulp before transfering the resulting liquid into a carboy. After that, there's close to a year of waiting, racking every couple of weeks (that means syphoning off the liquid into another carboy, leaving sediment on the bottom). When I've gone a few weeks without any sediment, then I stop the fermenting reaction, let stand for another couple weeks, THEN I start bottling...

Bottling is actually the hardest part. See, I have to fidn a day that I have NOTHING to do, and nowhere I need to be. Figure roughly 10 bottle out of a 5 gallon carboy... and each of those bottles means another mouthful of meade. And there's like 10 carboys that need to be bottled. Needless to say, I'm usually pretty useless after I'm done bottling...

So... that's the process. As for the offer to Babs and AD: they pick the flavor, I'll make it up. Done that for a few friends over the years (usually only a couple bottles though). Whatever it is they want, they'll have at least 10 aged bottles ready when things get "finalized" (that way, they HAVE to invite me:D)

As to wether or not I do a good job: I had someone once offer me $20 a bottle for as much as I'd come up with. And more than one offer of sexual favors. Makes me think I'm doing something right...