Never eat yellow snow from a publicly accessible area. That is an immutable truth. Also, Brian's beard is on the verge of surpassing distinctive, and moving toward impressive. Got a bit to go until majestic, though
I remember how much you didn’t like this when it was freshly brewed. How wonderful that aging improved it. I’m excited you are going to France, ooh la la
Had to share this story, my kid (11yo) is making powered Mac and cheese for our dinner. He pours out the cheese packet and then I hear *wack wack* "thwack your packet"😂
On one of your videos someone said they buk aged their blueberry mead for 5+yrs so I asked for the recipe. (Newbe here, didn't know any better) They said No, it's their competition mead. COOL 😎. I found out that home brewers have competitions!
In my 2 years of brewing only one bottle has made it past 4 months. That one made it 11 months and is currently in the fridge and halfway gone. Yum! I need more brewing and storage space so that I can Brew and keep more wines and meads.
Wife won't let me have any more space in the house but I used to be self-employed so I still have an office in the house. It might finally be time to get rid of the desk and office storage to create space for carboys and brewing equipment. 😎
I only really started homebrewing a bit over a year ago. I made a variant of the apple pie mead July '23. I aged it a few months and had it last Christmas. I kept a couple bottles to see what a year does to it. Im excited to try it *this* Christmas!
Glad I came across you guys today. I started my 1st mead back in February. Racked into secondary after a month and forgot about it. Been in the closet under my stairs since then. I should probably go finish and bottle. Be ready to go for the holidays.
Everyone hates that I use non-committal phraseology (avoiding always, never, and other absolutes.) My bosses get absolutely annoyed that I do it. But it helps for managing expectations. 🥴
Love your channel, keep up the great work. I started brewing back in '06. My 3rd batch was a blackberry mead using fresh blackberries from a local u-pick as well as their honey. The 5 gallon batch ended up about 15%. Bottled most of it into 1 gallon wine bottles. Life happens and 3 bottles ended up in a box under the basement stairs. All the brewing equipment got stashed and forgotten about. 12 years later, we were cleaning out that area and saw the box, remembering what was in it. Very surprised to find that the mead was excellent. Shared it with friends and family that all couldn't believe that I made it and that is was so old. Have a little bit left, need to drink it up. Since then, I've made 8 more batches, mostly 5 gallon. Currently getting ready to rack and bottle a Cyser that I started last October. I adhere to the idea that mead making is a very slow process and not for everyone, you do what works for you and it's all good, the end product is the most important. Keep giving us great information and enjoy your "working vacation". ❤❤
I have some bottles of Mead that stretch back 30+ years... I have one left of a Damiana Beltane Mead... Took the other one to Pennsic and shared it with a few SCA Meadmakers and it was quite complex and was very enjoyable.
Your summary at the end of this video is spot on. That's why I love you two and that's also why I got into homebrew myself. It's not about making something that will impress the wine snobs, it's about getting back to the tradition of it all. It's about the magic of natural products and natural processes, under the kitchen table, what grandma used to make for the family get-together. There is no greater pleasure than cracking open a bottle of homemade booze a year after you started making it, under the shade of the tree that where you collected the fruit... Much love and keep on keeping on.
Around 11:00 when your talking about the breakdown of proteins during aging, a good example of this is if you ever make clarified milk punches. Clarifying obviously adds whey proteins to your drink which during a aging process will take what starts off as a slightly fuller mouthfeel and turn it into a actually visibly thicker starting to lead into syrupy. Good aged milk punches if you can ever find one are awesome but unfortunately the process mostly died out and only recently hit a short revival.
And this is why when I started this adventure of mead and wine making decided to make 2 gallon batches. Thanks for confirming what I thought would happen with aging ones creations over time. They get better..
i think you have a good point with people in the past being more tolerable to less good tasting stuff. My parents lived trough the Dutch hunger winter of 1944-1945 when the Germans deprived the Dutch of all acces to food as revanche for the train strike during operation Market Garden and the resistanece blowing up all the railroad tracks leading to Arnhem and Nijmwegen which both hindered their counter attack . My fathers and his family survived eating tulip bulps while my mother and all her siblings and cousins by then had been living in hiding all scattered across the country for 2 and a half years so already for 2 and half years dependend on how many food coupons the resistance could steel from German administrative buildings with their raids My parents would eat anything no matter if it was disgusting tasting of it's own or being expired, Food is food so when you have it you eat it, and all of it, regardless of how it tastes! That was their motto and how they tried to raise me! (i'm kind of stuburn and critical when it comes to food and how it should taste so i spend more time sitting on the stairs with a half finished plate and not allowed to go anywhere untill i finished it then i did in school). So i can emagine how that tolerance to taste and don't waste anything mentality also counted for people 800 years or longer ago when food availability was not such a certainty like it is today.
I made some mead over 20 years ago. Stuck it in a closet and forgot about it. Went to dump it out, but figured I'd cautiously try some just to see. It's amazing.
Great video. This answered some of my questions. I have one bottle of my first batch of wine back in 2020 that I'm going to Crack open for Thanksgiving 🤞
You guys are by far my favorite homebrew channel. I watch your videos sometimes just to visit, even if I dont plan on making the brew youre talking about 😂 The older I get, the more I'm becoming like you guys lol
Some great analogies used in regards to then and now. Last year I was given a bottle of mead from 1979 which happened to be the year I was born, it surprisingly tasted pretty good.
Our first brews started in August of '23... Took most of them through the final rack, but still needed to taste for balance, sweetness etc. We both struggled with our health and just in the last few months managed to get some done. The last we made was grape juice wine. It was nice, occasionally dipped some out for cooking, but it never got racked... 1 year later... Raisin wine... Will still work for cooking. In fact, I'm about to play with some ingredients for a savory cooking wine...
I believe that most of aging making a drink worse comes either from oxygen exposure or hot temperature exposure. I have never had a drink get notably worse unless I suspect at least one of these got to it.
I made a cider that turned out very nice. (Your recipe 😍) I found a bottle at around the year mark and it tasted incredible. It made me wish i had saved some to the year mark. Now I am trying to make more brews so they have time to age some before I drink them because every brew I have made has only gotten better with age. Thanks for this video I really enjoy watching and learning. I may have to try a mead sometime but have never tried one before so a little hesitant.
I didn't find any videos about preserving opened bottles, e.g., drinking a glass today, sealing the bottle, then drinking another glass in a week or two. It's called 'wine inerting' and there seem to be two popular methods, one quite expensive called "Coravin" and one a lot less expensive called "Private Preserve." I made a gallon of a wine and later a mead (both fortified to 22%, so there shouldn't be anything growing in it) and I was _very_ happy with both when I started a bottle (I generally only drink when I smoke a cigar, which is rarely ever more than once a day), but within a couple of weeks I found the flavor profile in both had dropped precipitously. The port wine I usually get (which is only fortified to around 17%) I could let sit for months and it would still taste great. The flavor profile might've shifted (I always meant to compare with a newly opened one, but always forgot), but it never became unpalatable. I'm wondering if it makes sense to get something to purge the oxygen from the bottle (a flip-top silicon gasket) after each pour as a way to extend the life of my efforts.
The more I taste my meads at room temp, the more I enjoy it. I’m sure there are some flavors that taste better cold. Also, I would never toss a mead after two years. If it smells good and there’s no funky stuff floating on the top, I’M DRINKING IT. Thanks for the video guys!
Consider doing more Capsicumel or holiday spiced meads. I've made a few batches of cherry habanero and am getting great results. Looking to explore this area and would love to obtain more of that sweet and hot combo.
If definitely helps if you store your brews that does a lot of temperature changes ideally in a basement. More so if you don't have air conditioning and where you live has several months were the temperature gets 90-115 degrees. The carrot cake mead I bottle three mouths ago. I had opened up a bottle at my mothers house for Thanksgiving. Myself and everyone that tried it really liked it and looking forward to what it taste a year or two-five years from now. I was watching a video from another channel were they were make a dark bochet mead based on a French Medieval times recipe. One of the commentators had mentioned they had made a dark bochet mead and they did not care for it. They let it age for something like fifteen years, but mostly this due to they forgot about it. They claimed it tasted absolutely amazing.
It’s funny in ways of timing…I had the Irish mead and I found it a little off putting but I tried it about 2 weeks ago and it rounded out nicely and it just sat on a shelf no adjustments at all☘️
On the topic of ageing on lees, that might be a nice experiment for you. From a single batch rack half to a smaller container, then stir up the renaining half and rack to a same sized vessel. After X months/year, compare the two.
True. Right now we are playing catch up since the evacuation and we are trying to get ahead at the same time since we have a trip coming up in December.
Just finished my black Cherry cider and bottle it. I corked a couple of the bottles and waxed the corks a s bottle mouths after. Looks cool and hopefully keeps the air out.
Thanks for the video. I've been tinkering with aging also. I have a shelf full of various brews I'm letting age. Also, mean and average are the same measure of central tendency. There are also median and mode. Perhaps one of those is what you were after.
I have had the best luck with aging traditional meads with higher abv. The ones that turned out the worst for me with long term aging are the melomels. I am not sure if it is my technique or just a matter of using fruit.
I enjoy making methylagin, it is harsh in the beginning. I set bottles aside and the oldest one I found was 6 years old, the flavors had melod and was amazing
This is a great explanation thanks. Tried my cranberry orange mead when racking and tasted like paint stripper and then honey 😢 😂so its staying put for a few more months 😊
Just watched a few videos ending with your 1 year blueberry wine tasting. When you said "I'd make five gallons" it made me want to see you do a large batch of something. Mead, cider, cyser, wine, basically anything in a larger batch size to see if there is a difference in process or end product.
@CitySteadingBrews sometimes when cooking in industrial scales recipies are not exactly proportional, that's the only reason I asked, that and I know you want a 55 gallon drum of blueberry wine
This topic reminds me of the "drinking windows" debate in the wine world - when is the vintage at its finest? Of course, that pertains only to maaybe 5% of the best wines made for aging, and it's totally subjective, but the famous writers have large audiences so they tend to be more conservative in their estimates, while properly stored bottles usually last way longer. I've been making wine for quite some time, but mead I only only started making just over 4 years ago and I totally age it at room temperature. I've also learned to appreciate fruit forward, sweeter drinks much, much more during this mead journey. In fact, I often prefer those now! Don't have the first couple of meads I've ever made, but I do still have a bottle of the third one and it's one of your viking blood versions! It was great originally and now it's at least 4 years old, I believe. Time to either open it or put it into the wine fridge. Ps. It'll be interesting to see you guys start experimenting with corks. I do use them for certain wines. For meads, less so and only certain types of cork. Anyhow, you'll need to do a deep dive, because there are so many different types of corks - made for specific purposes and lengths of aging.
We've done strawberry rhubarb and it's PHENOMENAL. We'll be doing more soon for sure. Adding some pie spices is a great idea! Maybe a little oak for some toastiness
I found a new flavor ingredient I thought you 2 might be interested in. Black pepper extract. It's made like tea but with black pepper. The resulting flavor is kinda crazy. It's peppery like ginger, and feels like cinnamon. I think it would work well with a mead made with ginger, honey( of coarse) black pepper extract and some citrus zest like orange. Interesting flavors.
I pulled out a blueberry I did back in 2020 yesterday. I put several I stashed in a case under my bed for a year tasting and totally forgot about them. I think I’m going to pull them all out for turkey day and the family can help give them a tasting. 😁
Just racked my mead off the lees. 14.5% ABV (FG: 1.012). Gonna bulk age and hope it'll be ready by Christmas. Taste was really good already, despite being young.
could you (or maybe you have) made mead or wine based on the 90's and early 2000s scents Pearberry and Cucumber Melon? i could see the latter being a semi dry white. And i learned the scent is based on honeydew melon, with hints of cantaloupe rather than any watermelon
Question: at what point do i introduce oak chips? Is it during secondary fermentation? I usually pasteurize at the end of secondary fermentation. Should introduce oak before or after pasteurization but before i bottle it?
As I asked about a while ago...swing tops are so dang variable on oxidation. I really ended up with Sherry. Did not seal well. Made some nice sauces though. lol
@@CitySteadingBrews Yeah, crummy clamp force. It was still usable if not something I'd like to drink on its own. As I said, made some great sauces. lol
I always hate absolutes and never use them. :P Seriously though, another excellent video. It was incredibly helpful, thank you for sharing! Sorry your glass being cracked :(
Final pH isn't necessarily something we worry about at all. They naturally become more acidic on their own. We only adjust acidity at the end for flavor reasons so pH wouldn't matter to me. If it needs it, it needs it. If it doesn't, it doesn't. Hope that makes sense.
About a year and a half ago I made an coffeemel that turned out way to sweet and acidic.I was going to dump it but wanted to try diluting it. I tried water, milk (yes really), and vodka - none of which made it any better. But I ended up doing the whole brew with vodka because I wanted it to reach 20% ish as I figured it would last longer on the shelf with a high ABV. Now a year and a half later it still tastes bad, but leagues better than when it was fresh. I suspect it will only improve with age, and I am excited for it's 10 year anniversary in the summer of 2033!
I'm assuming some of the thousands of years old honey found in Egyptian tombs was also mixed with water and dead flys, thus also mead after a few months (flys have yeast and nutrition), and probably still drinkable, the honey apparently is still good.
"Grabbing the whole hive and sticking it in a bucket..." I have pretty much done that; wild ferment of raw honey comb... it was good. Would I risk it again? Probably not. It took a year to finish too
13:15 about to cry over the wastefulness of some people 😢... The only brew that I ever threw out was one made during the time you made that and we were doing the natural fermentation thing and I had one stall that couldn't be brought back and ended up having blue and green mold floating in it, so it went out the window
So I've had 4 different store-juice based wine batches bottled for roughly a year. I know there are a lot of variables but juice, sugar, 71B, black tea and fermO. nothing else. At 6 months they were all great. At 12 they all had the same heavy butterscotchy flavor. A friend said classic oxidation. I used the flippy top bottles with new silicone seals. Given the age, does this sound like air in the seals or something in the batches?
Sounds more like diacetyl to me. But citation tastes stale, or even grassy. If you had left it on the lees for a week or two at the end of fermentation that would have never happened. That said... should age out but may take a while.
@@CitySteadingBrews no no, 6 months in the bottle after fermenting and bulk aging they were great. they developed that flavor after that at some point. Not stale or grassy, just butterscotchy with the back taste of the actual wine. They sat on the lees and aged for roughly 3 weeks after fermenting was finished before i racked it.
@ thanks guys :) I’ll try again soon. The funny thing is it was all store bought juice that turned, the frozen blueberry I made didn’t but it was only in the bottle for about 7-8 months. Maybe something in juice?
Hey! Love your vids! But im in crises mode, just started a batch of blueberry wine (21l , sugar, blueberry jam, jasmine flower tea, roibos orange tea, black pepper, cinnamon and black tea) and it started fermenting nice, but im getting a very off puttin sulfur (roten eggs) smell coming out of it, never smelled that before. Any advice please?? Shall i just dump it?
@@CitySteadingBrews I've givent it a good shake (as much as i could as its very heavy!) to try to aerate it a bit, i will do that for the first couple days of fermentation just in case. Never did a batch this big, and i was freakin out!! Thank you so much for the advice, saved my day! Hugs!
I have a lot of homemade mead (140+ bottles) in my house, & I store 100 of them on their side in a wine rack. I use swing top, 750ml Belgian beer bottles. Is your concern about storing them on their sides one of oxidation? I store them this way for convenience. Am I doing it wrong?
Took a gravity reading of my absolute first batch of mead earlier today. It started out at 1.110, and is now at 1.000. Going to wait another week to take a confirmation reading. I’m hoping that it clears up soon. Is there anyway to tell how long a brew will take to clear?
Hi, I came across a yeast named VitiFerm Vulcano that claims to contain additional yeast strain of "Pichia kluyveri" for extra fruity flavours. Has anyone here ever used it? Is it worth the premium price?
Most of my meads are stored in my basement. The temperature does not have the big swings that the rest of the house would have... no central air. I have not had any go bad yet.
The only one positive I've heard on garum is the umami taste of it was good. Does that mean it was good? Probably not, but umami is a weird thing (imo), but I understand your point. Mackerel left in the sun in clay pots sounds rancid. I watched a video of, I think Tasting History, that actually made some...and ICK!
On the topic of expiration dates. My parents do that. I'm like "It's still good for a while! Stop throwing it out just because it's a day or two past expiration!" Something like perishables I can see, but eggs, milk, juice? Not necessary
once back in a time ..like 2007 i started my first brew ..because i found the comercial type on an event taste like fruitjuice ish sirupy something .. 4 botles in still nothing in being tipsy (5%abvs) so i can do better was my way to go and made an applemead. 18%abv and i still have 1 dusty corked stone bottle wich i tried 2 years ago just to look.. it was pure gold at visual inspection and then the taste .. imagine a fresh apple covered with honey like those caramel apples "on a stick" smooth sweet everything perfect , i resealed the bottle and dust came back over it .. i will see when something special happens if i open it and drink it ;)
For more on garum, look for Max Miller's Tasting History videos on garum. Make your own at home! Or not. Brian, your beard is getting to be like in your early Viking's blood video. Fluffy!
@ you were saying, “we have better shit today than they had 3k years ago. Like spices, and hydrometers and stuff.” Their hot pockets was probably a dead skunk. 🦨 you said whatever it’s called was fish guts. lol just making a joke! Sorry.
I love the captions you’ve been adding to your videos like “for that one guy” and “that’s fair” haha
Never eat yellow snow from a publicly accessible area. That is an immutable truth.
Also, Brian's beard is on the verge of surpassing distinctive, and moving toward impressive. Got a bit to go until majestic, though
Umm... yup. Or a private area.... or... at all!
@@CitySteadingBrews if it's a lemon snow cone, it's probably fine.
I remember how much you didn’t like this when it was freshly brewed. How wonderful that aging improved it. I’m excited you are going to France, ooh la la
Had to share this story, my kid (11yo) is making powered Mac and cheese for our dinner. He pours out the cheese packet and then I hear *wack wack* "thwack your packet"😂
Haha!
"If it tastes like absolute crap and gets you drunk" - things that IPA drinkers still say to try and convince people to try them. 😂
LOL, true!
Well in that case, coffee tastes crap yet it is the second/third most common drink.
(Most people have it black).
I never understand IPA haters.
Everyone has their own taste. I personally don't like IPA's at all but many do.
I don’t understand the IPA craze of the last 15 yrs. Worst thing to put in a mug.
I found 3 bottles of my Holiday Mead I made 3 years ago. It tastes better now than it ever did
Very cool!
On one of your videos someone said they buk aged their blueberry mead for 5+yrs so I asked for the recipe. (Newbe here, didn't know any better) They said No, it's their competition mead. COOL 😎. I found out that home brewers have competitions!
Yeah well... anyone who reacts like that I wouldn't pay much attention to anyway.
This video is a good reminder for me to keep and age things, and give time a chance.
Love your videos, thanks guys!
Our pleasure!
In my 2 years of brewing only one bottle has made it past 4 months.
That one made it 11 months and is currently in the fridge and halfway gone. Yum!
I need more brewing and storage space so that I can Brew and keep more wines and meads.
Yup, just make more... that's the easy way to have some to save.
Wife won't let me have any more space in the house but I used to be self-employed so I still have an office in the house.
It might finally be time to get rid of the desk and office storage to create space for carboys and brewing equipment. 😎
I only really started homebrewing a bit over a year ago. I made a variant of the apple pie mead July '23. I aged it a few months and had it last Christmas. I kept a couple bottles to see what a year does to it. Im excited to try it *this* Christmas!
Nice!
Glad I came across you guys today. I started my 1st mead back in February. Racked into secondary after a month and forgot about it. Been in the closet under my stairs since then. I should probably go finish and bottle. Be ready to go for the holidays.
Sounds good! We often let them go that long before bottling.
They are good company! So cute to watch, and good content
Everyone hates that I use non-committal phraseology (avoiding always, never, and other absolutes.) My bosses get absolutely annoyed that I do it. But it helps for managing expectations. 🥴
Life is rarely absolute, with one exception.
Love your channel, keep up the great work.
I started brewing back in '06. My 3rd batch was a blackberry mead using fresh blackberries from a local u-pick as well as their honey. The 5 gallon batch ended up about 15%. Bottled most of it into 1 gallon wine bottles. Life happens and 3 bottles ended up in a box under the basement stairs. All the brewing equipment got stashed and forgotten about. 12 years later, we were cleaning out that area and saw the box, remembering what was in it. Very surprised to find that the mead was excellent. Shared it with friends and family that all couldn't believe that I made it and that is was so old. Have a little bit left, need to drink it up. Since then, I've made 8 more batches, mostly 5 gallon. Currently getting ready to rack and bottle a Cyser that I started last October. I adhere to the idea that mead making is a very slow process and not for everyone, you do what works for you and it's all good, the end product is the most important.
Keep giving us great information and enjoy your "working vacation". ❤❤
That's cool! Found brews are awesome!
I have some bottles of Mead that stretch back 30+ years...
I have one left of a Damiana Beltane Mead...
Took the other one to Pennsic and shared it with a few SCA Meadmakers and it was quite complex and was very enjoyable.
Wow, that is awesome!
That particular one was bottled in 2000-2003
Damiana is nice in a mead.
Just back sweetened my first Caramel Apple Bochet. Very excited to share at Christmas and put some away for next year. ❤
Cool!
Your summary at the end of this video is spot on. That's why I love you two and that's also why I got into homebrew myself. It's not about making something that will impress the wine snobs, it's about getting back to the tradition of it all.
It's about the magic of natural products and natural processes, under the kitchen table, what grandma used to make for the family get-together. There is no greater pleasure than cracking open a bottle of homemade booze a year after you started making it, under the shade of the tree that where you collected the fruit...
Much love and keep on keeping on.
Thank you!
Around 11:00 when your talking about the breakdown of proteins during aging, a good example of this is if you ever make clarified milk punches. Clarifying obviously adds whey proteins to your drink which during a aging process will take what starts off as a slightly fuller mouthfeel and turn it into a actually visibly thicker starting to lead into syrupy. Good aged milk punches if you can ever find one are awesome but unfortunately the process mostly died out and only recently hit a short revival.
And this is why when I started this adventure of mead and wine making decided to make 2 gallon batches. Thanks for confirming what I thought would happen with aging ones creations over time. They get better..
i think you have a good point with people in the past being more tolerable to less good tasting stuff. My parents lived trough the Dutch hunger winter of 1944-1945 when the Germans deprived the Dutch of all acces to food as revanche for the train strike during operation Market Garden and the resistanece blowing up all the railroad tracks leading to Arnhem and Nijmwegen which both hindered their counter attack . My fathers and his family survived eating tulip bulps while my mother and all her siblings and cousins by then had been living in hiding all scattered across the country for 2 and a half years so already for 2 and half years dependend on how many food coupons the resistance could steel from German administrative buildings with their raids My parents would eat anything no matter if it was disgusting tasting of it's own or being expired, Food is food so when you have it you eat it, and all of it, regardless of how it tastes! That was their motto and how they tried to raise me! (i'm kind of stuburn and critical when it comes to food and how it should taste so i spend more time sitting on the stairs with a half finished plate and not allowed to go anywhere untill i finished it then i did in school). So i can emagine how that tolerance to taste and don't waste anything mentality also counted for people 800 years or longer ago when food availability was not such a certainty like it is today.
I have the green finger problem, but worse, when I clean my wet erase maps for D&D.
I can see that too!
Have fun! I can't wait to see what new things you come up with after your trip.
I made some mead over 20 years ago. Stuck it in a closet and forgot about it. Went to dump it out, but figured I'd cautiously try some just to see. It's amazing.
lol, yeah, hear that kind of thing a lot!
Great video. This answered some of my questions. I have one bottle of my first batch of wine back in 2020 that I'm going to Crack open for Thanksgiving 🤞
Nice!
You guys are by far my favorite homebrew channel. I watch your videos sometimes just to visit, even if I dont plan on making the brew youre talking about 😂
The older I get, the more I'm becoming like you guys lol
Thanks for watching 😀👍
Some great analogies used in regards to then and now.
Last year I was given a bottle of mead from 1979 which happened to be the year I was born, it surprisingly tasted pretty good.
Our first brews started in August of '23... Took most of them through the final rack, but still needed to taste for balance, sweetness etc. We both struggled with our health and just in the last few months managed to get some done. The last we made was grape juice wine. It was nice, occasionally dipped some out for cooking, but it never got racked... 1 year later... Raisin wine... Will still work for cooking. In fact, I'm about to play with some ingredients for a savory cooking wine...
I believe that most of aging making a drink worse comes either from oxygen exposure or hot temperature exposure. I have never had a drink get notably worse unless I suspect at least one of these got to it.
Or infections of some kind, yup, totally agree.
S C Johnson & Sons are gonna be loving the free product placement.😂😂😂
I made a cider that turned out very nice. (Your recipe 😍) I found a bottle at around the year mark and it tasted incredible. It made me wish i had saved some to the year mark. Now I am trying to make more brews so they have time to age some before I drink them because every brew I have made has only gotten better with age. Thanks for this video I really enjoy watching and learning. I may have to try a mead sometime but have never tried one before so a little hesitant.
I didn't find any videos about preserving opened bottles, e.g., drinking a glass today, sealing the bottle, then drinking another glass in a week or two. It's called 'wine inerting' and there seem to be two popular methods, one quite expensive called "Coravin" and one a lot less expensive called "Private Preserve." I made a gallon of a wine and later a mead (both fortified to 22%, so there shouldn't be anything growing in it) and I was _very_ happy with both when I started a bottle (I generally only drink when I smoke a cigar, which is rarely ever more than once a day), but within a couple of weeks I found the flavor profile in both had dropped precipitously. The port wine I usually get (which is only fortified to around 17%) I could let sit for months and it would still taste great. The flavor profile might've shifted (I always meant to compare with a newly opened one, but always forgot), but it never became unpalatable. I'm wondering if it makes sense to get something to purge the oxygen from the bottle (a flip-top silicon gasket) after each pour as a way to extend the life of my efforts.
We just put it in the fridge and drink within a few days or so.
The more I taste my meads at room temp, the more I enjoy it. I’m sure there are some flavors that taste better cold. Also, I would never toss a mead after two years. If it smells good and there’s no funky stuff floating on the top, I’M DRINKING IT. Thanks for the video guys!
Consider doing more Capsicumel or holiday spiced meads. I've made a few batches of cherry habanero and am getting great results. Looking to explore this area and would love to obtain more of that sweet and hot combo.
We've done a few, but sure, we can always make more capsicumels.
If definitely helps if you store your brews that does a lot of temperature changes ideally in a basement. More so if you don't have air conditioning and where you live has several months were the temperature gets 90-115 degrees. The carrot cake mead I bottle three mouths ago. I had opened up a bottle at my mothers house for Thanksgiving. Myself and everyone that tried it really liked it and looking forward to what it taste a year or two-five years from now. I was watching a video from another channel were they were make a dark bochet mead based on a French Medieval times recipe. One of the commentators had mentioned they had made a dark bochet mead and they did not care for it. They let it age for something like fifteen years, but mostly this due to they forgot about it. They claimed it tasted absolutely amazing.
It’s funny in ways of timing…I had the Irish mead and I found it a little off putting but I tried it about 2 weeks ago and it rounded out nicely and it just sat on a shelf no adjustments at all☘️
Hope you enjoy!
Sláinte
On the topic of ageing on lees, that might be a nice experiment for you. From a single batch rack half to a smaller container, then stir up the renaining half and rack to a same sized vessel. After X months/year, compare the two.
Takes a long long time. Maybe?
@CitySteadingBrews True. But even if after X months there is no difference you still make a point.
True. Right now we are playing catch up since the evacuation and we are trying to get ahead at the same time since we have a trip coming up in December.
Some yeasts, like D47, are supposed to improve your wine if you age on the lees.
Just finished my black Cherry cider and bottle it. I corked a couple of the bottles and waxed the corks a s bottle mouths after. Looks cool and hopefully keeps the air out.
Can't hurt!
Thanks for the video. I've been tinkering with aging also. I have a shelf full of various brews I'm letting age. Also, mean and average are the same measure of central tendency. There are also median and mode. Perhaps one of those is what you were after.
Could be!
I have had the best luck with aging traditional meads with higher abv. The ones that turned out the worst for me with long term aging are the melomels. I am not sure if it is my technique or just a matter of using fruit.
As a teenager I had the opportunity to try a bottle of Elderberry wine that had been stored in a water cistern on a rope for decades that was AWESOME.
Wow, that sounds really cool!
I enjoy making methylagin, it is harsh in the beginning. I set bottles aside and the oldest one I found was 6 years old, the flavors had melod and was amazing
This is a great explanation thanks. Tried my cranberry orange mead when racking and tasted like paint stripper and then honey 😢 😂so its staying put for a few more months 😊
I'd maybe even go longer. We've seen huge differences sometimes from one year to a few years.
Brian got that Santa beard going aka Brewa Claus
Just watched a few videos ending with your 1 year blueberry wine tasting. When you said "I'd make five gallons" it made me want to see you do a large batch of something. Mead, cider, cyser, wine, basically anything in a larger batch size to see if there is a difference in process or end product.
There is no difference.
@CitySteadingBrews sometimes when cooking in industrial scales recipies are not exactly proportional, that's the only reason I asked, that and I know you want a 55 gallon drum of blueberry wine
The only difference is amount of yeast doesn't scale equally. I couldn't speak for large volumes as that's beyond the scope of homebrew.
This topic reminds me of the "drinking windows" debate in the wine world - when is the vintage at its finest? Of course, that pertains only to maaybe 5% of the best wines made for aging, and it's totally subjective, but the famous writers have large audiences so they tend to be more conservative in their estimates, while properly stored bottles usually last way longer.
I've been making wine for quite some time, but mead I only only started making just over 4 years ago and I totally age it at room temperature. I've also learned to appreciate fruit forward, sweeter drinks much, much more during this mead journey. In fact, I often prefer those now!
Don't have the first couple of meads I've ever made, but I do still have a bottle of the third one and it's one of your viking blood versions! It was great originally and now it's at least 4 years old, I believe. Time to either open it or put it into the wine fridge.
Ps. It'll be interesting to see you guys start experimenting with corks. I do use them for certain wines. For meads, less so and only certain types of cork.
Anyhow, you'll need to do a deep dive, because there are so many different types of corks - made for specific purposes and lengths of aging.
Not sure we will use corks a lot tbh. Just don't see a good reason personally.
Hunger is the best sauce. Thanks for your videos.
Or as we Dutch would say: "Honger maakt rauwe bonen zoet." (Hunger makes raw beans sweet.)
Have yall ever thought of doing a strawberry Rhubarb pie wine? Now I want to try it myself.
If we could ever get fresh rhubarb.
We've done strawberry rhubarb and it's PHENOMENAL. We'll be doing more soon for sure. Adding some pie spices is a great idea! Maybe a little oak for some toastiness
How many pounds would you need? Id be happy to hook you up next spring!@CitySteadingBrews
@mkdouglas8919 unless you can get it here fresh it won't work out, others have tried and it spoiled on the trip.
@@CitySteadingBrews well that fills me with extreme sadness. I shall go drown my sorrows around the fire with a bottle of spiced fig mead.
Great discussion - TY. ❤
I have a couple of gallons of coffee mead that are getting up there. I may have to pick up a bottle of Bailey's to go with!
Nice combo!
I found a new flavor ingredient I thought you 2 might be interested in. Black pepper extract. It's made like tea but with black pepper. The resulting flavor is kinda crazy. It's peppery like ginger, and feels like cinnamon. I think it would work well with a mead made with ginger, honey( of coarse) black pepper extract and some citrus zest like orange. Interesting flavors.
We have actually used black pepper in brews before 😀
I pulled out a blueberry I did back in 2020 yesterday. I put several I stashed in a case under my bed for a year tasting and totally forgot about them. I think I’m going to pull them all out for turkey day and the family can help give them a tasting. 😁
Found forgotten brews are always awesome!
You guys should really try a yuzu brew of some kind. It's like everything great about lemons but better
Just racked my mead off the lees. 14.5% ABV (FG: 1.012). Gonna bulk age and hope it'll be ready by Christmas. Taste was really good already, despite being young.
If you like it now, it will be fine at Christmas, but probably better next year or even the year after!
@CitySteadingBrews Oh it's not gonna make it until next Christmas. 😂
I just bottled 5 gallons of pomegranate wine and it's gonna probably sit for at least a few months in my cellar before I open it
I was actually watching your other video on aged brews, the one with the 6 year brew a day before this came out
I like to leave mine for at least 6 months after backsweeting to allow any "solids" in the sweetner used to settle out.
Yup! We do too now more or less.
On oxidation of partially consumed bottles; how much time can you buy with the vacuum sealer pump stoppers?
I couldn't really say as we don't do it. Open bottles in the fridge last us a week or so, often more if we let them.
could you (or maybe you have) made mead or wine based on the 90's and early 2000s scents Pearberry and Cucumber Melon? i could see the latter being a semi dry white. And i learned the scent is based on honeydew melon, with hints of cantaloupe rather than any watermelon
I assume it could be done... but we haven't done it.
Question: at what point do i introduce oak chips? Is it during secondary fermentation? I usually pasteurize at the end of secondary fermentation. Should introduce oak before or after pasteurization but before i bottle it?
After pasteurization or conditioning phase (some call that secondary fermentation but it makes no sense as it should be done fermenting!)
As I asked about a while ago...swing tops are so dang variable on oxidation. I really ended up with Sherry. Did not seal well. Made some nice sauces though. lol
May need new seals? Or, some swing tops have weaker clamps.
@@CitySteadingBrews Yeah, crummy clamp force. It was still usable if not something I'd like to drink on its own. As I said, made some great sauces. lol
I always hate absolutes and never use them. :P Seriously though, another excellent video. It was incredibly helpful, thank you for sharing! Sorry your glass being cracked :(
Thanks and glad it helped.
Could you please provide us a final ph on your brews so we have an idea how acidic to make ours, to relatively match your recipes?
Final pH isn't necessarily something we worry about at all. They naturally become more acidic on their own. We only adjust acidity at the end for flavor reasons so pH wouldn't matter to me. If it needs it, it needs it. If it doesn't, it doesn't. Hope that makes sense.
Hah, drinking a 10 year old commercial brewed, Barleywine Ale as I watch your video. Taste as good as any beer made this year.
About a year and a half ago I made an coffeemel that turned out way to sweet and acidic.I was going to dump it but wanted to try diluting it. I tried water, milk (yes really), and vodka - none of which made it any better. But I ended up doing the whole brew with vodka because I wanted it to reach 20% ish as I figured it would last longer on the shelf with a high ABV. Now a year and a half later it still tastes bad, but leagues better than when it was fresh. I suspect it will only improve with age, and I am excited for it's 10 year anniversary in the summer of 2033!
Not sure how much better it will get at this point.
I'm assuming some of the thousands of years old honey found in Egyptian tombs was also mixed with water and dead flys, thus also mead after a few months (flys have yeast and nutrition), and probably still drinkable, the honey apparently is still good.
Couldn't tell you.
"Grabbing the whole hive and sticking it in a bucket..." I have pretty much done that; wild ferment of raw honey comb... it was good. Would I risk it again? Probably not. It took a year to finish too
Lol
13:15 about to cry over the wastefulness of some people 😢...
The only brew that I ever threw out was one made during the time you made that and we were doing the natural fermentation thing and I had one stall that couldn't be brought back and ended up having blue and green mold floating in it, so it went out the window
Yeah, mold gets dumped.
I just discovered a bottle on the back shelf from 2022 where the cork popped off. Vinegar it is!
Maybe? But not always. Probably oxidized though.
@@CitySteadingBrews I'd be more worried about all the bugs in the bottom of the bottle
True.
I have a strawberry mead that I tasted after 8 years and was better than after a few years. I still have a bottle going on 14 years.
So I've had 4 different store-juice based wine batches bottled for roughly a year. I know there are a lot of variables but juice, sugar, 71B, black tea and fermO. nothing else. At 6 months they were all great. At 12 they all had the same heavy butterscotchy flavor. A friend said classic oxidation. I used the flippy top bottles with new silicone seals. Given the age, does this sound like air in the seals or something in the batches?
Sounds more like diacetyl to me. But citation tastes stale, or even grassy. If you had left it on the lees for a week or two at the end of fermentation that would have never happened. That said... should age out but may take a while.
@@CitySteadingBrews no no, 6 months in the bottle after fermenting and bulk aging they were great. they developed that flavor after that at some point. Not stale or grassy, just butterscotchy with the back taste of the actual wine. They sat on the lees and aged for roughly 3 weeks after fermenting was finished before i racked it.
Oxidation doesn't taste like butterscotch though...
@ thanks guys :) I’ll try again soon. The funny thing is it was all store bought juice that turned, the frozen blueberry I made didn’t but it was only in the bottle for about 7-8 months. Maybe something in juice?
Hey! Love your vids! But im in crises mode, just started a batch of blueberry wine (21l , sugar, blueberry jam, jasmine flower tea, roibos orange tea, black pepper, cinnamon and black tea) and it started fermenting nice, but im getting a very off puttin sulfur (roten eggs) smell coming out of it, never smelled that before. Any advice please?? Shall i just dump it?
It's caused by yeast stress and is totally harmless. Mostly it's from not oxygenating at the start. It's t will age out.
@@CitySteadingBrews oh!! Thanks! I thought i was creating 21l of poison! :D
@@CitySteadingBrews I've givent it a good shake (as much as i could as its very heavy!) to try to aerate it a bit, i will do that for the first couple days of fermentation just in case. Never did a batch this big, and i was freakin out!! Thank you so much for the advice, saved my day! Hugs!
Not likely.
@@CitySteadingBrews ❤
Ooh and you are going to belgium , that's close to where i live in the netherlands near the coast , welcome to the glatlands haha
I have a lot of homemade mead (140+ bottles) in my house, & I store 100 of them on their side in a wine rack. I use swing top, 750ml Belgian beer bottles. Is your concern about storing them on their sides one of oxidation? I store them this way for convenience. Am I doing it wrong?
You only store corks on the side. Swing tops can leak if on their side. Same for screw caps. You might be lucky and it doesn't happen though.
What you need to do is leave something for 4 years then just before tasting it MAKE IT AGAIN to the same recipe and compare them together!
Wouldn't really be a fair test as things are always a little different each batch, but I see what you're saying.
Took a gravity reading of my absolute first batch of mead earlier today. It started out at 1.110, and is now at 1.000. Going to wait another week to take a confirmation reading. I’m hoping that it clears up soon. Is there anyway to tell how long a brew will take to clear?
No way to know but clarity doesn't mean a whole lot imho.
Hi, I came across a yeast named VitiFerm Vulcano that claims to contain additional yeast strain of "Pichia kluyveri" for extra fruity flavours.
Has anyone here ever used it? Is it worth the premium price?
Never heard of it, but to be fair we do usually go for fancy yeasts, lol.
Found you guys 4 months ago I am now on my 3rd mead which is a pineapple coconut bochet
Most of my meads are stored in my basement. The temperature does not have the big swings that the rest of the house would have... no central air.
I have not had any go bad yet.
The only one positive I've heard on garum is the umami taste of it was good. Does that mean it was good? Probably not, but umami is a weird thing (imo), but I understand your point. Mackerel left in the sun in clay pots sounds rancid. I watched a video of, I think Tasting History, that actually made some...and ICK!
It mostly covered up rotting food.
Worcestershire sauce is based on "rotting fish", as is muk thon (Vietnamese fish sauce), and soy sauce is the vegan version.
Sort of. Yup.
You should try a persimmon wine.
On the topic of expiration dates. My parents do that. I'm like "It's still good for a while! Stop throwing it out just because it's a day or two past expiration!" Something like perishables I can see, but eggs, milk, juice? Not necessary
Thank you!
"neither here nor there" I believe the scratch definitely both here and there. lol
would u be up to make a alcoholic chai tea drink
th-cam.com/video/6ITxlh3M95E/w-d-xo.htmlsi=u-YTkh_lX7Ev4TSZ
@@CitySteadingBrews thank you for replying
once back in a time ..like 2007 i started my first brew ..because i found the comercial type on an event taste like fruitjuice ish sirupy something .. 4 botles in still nothing in being tipsy (5%abvs) so i can do better was my way to go and made an applemead. 18%abv and i still have 1 dusty corked stone bottle wich i tried 2 years ago just to look..
it was pure gold at visual inspection and then the taste .. imagine a fresh apple covered with honey like those caramel apples "on a stick" smooth sweet everything perfect , i resealed the bottle and dust came back over it .. i will see when something special happens if i open it and drink it ;)
Sounds really good!
For more on garum, look for Max Miller's Tasting History videos on garum. Make your own at home! Or not.
Brian, your beard is getting to be like in your early Viking's blood video. Fluffy!
Enjoy your Fermentis trip! That sounds awesoooooommmme!
I have a bottle of mead from 1999 lol always meant to drink it on a special occasion lol
Oooh, wow, curious to hear about this one!
Garam is msg , that stuff was damn near addictive 😂
Well it has glutamic acid but so to tomatoes and mushrooms 😀
What's your oldest mead you have?
It was this, lol.
Been watching the vid... and i was kindof wondering... how you managed to get anything to be 4 years old?? I think all of my brews die too young :D
Don't drink it? Lol.
@@CitySteadingBrews Well, i may be as good as brewer as a salsa maker... even the hottest we finish!
Great info as usual. On a different note, what is with the 2 different braids in Derica's hair? Just curious.
She likes to play with her hair.
Light color / white wines turn darker with age
Wow
😊😊😊😊
??
Even if i don't like it i still drink it. It makes me mad when people dump hombrew they don't like
Why is it that Lemon Pledge says made with natural lemon and lemon drops are made with artificial flavors?
Good question!
I made an acerglyn that was great right when I bottled it. I have a few bottles left that are almost a year old and are amazing now.
Rotten fish guts.. 😮 That'll make me appreciate those brews and dishes that sometimes come out meh.
Okay, it sounds like you now need to make a Polish Mead.
Not likely as they take a decade or more...
Their microwave hot pockets was a dead skunk on some rocks, on a hot summer day. Lol
What are you talking about?
@ you were saying, “we have better shit today than they had 3k years ago. Like spices, and hydrometers and stuff.” Their hot pockets was probably a dead skunk. 🦨 you said whatever it’s called was fish guts. lol just making a joke! Sorry.