welcome back to method of the meatness i'm burley mullins and uh if you've been following along um you'll know why this isn't a plastic jug if not please go back and watch parts one and two of this um today we're going to be bottling the cheap beginner mead where i revisit the very first mead i ever made and talk about the changes that i made now why i made them and the most and where you can cut corners and cost in making mead especially if you're new to the hobby and trying to get into it
for the first time come with me [Music] as you saw in the intro we're going to be bottling this mead today and in keeping with the spirit of cutting costs where possible and still making a really good bang for your buck mead we're going to be using a couple of uh used wine bottles a limoncello bottle and another swing top bottle that i just happen to come by just a hodgepodge of bottles that you can get your hands on and you know just in keeping with the spirit of this i'm still going to be siphoning
using my auto siphon just because using a plain vinyl tube kind of a pain um you know you can seal the top squeeze the bottle until it starts you know that there's a lot of tricks you can do i just don't feel like doing them any doing any of them right now so um without further ado i'm going to go ahead and get this siphoned off into these bottles we're going to do a final gravity reading and i'm going to do a quick taste test to see where it stands before bottle conditioning there's you know
a decent amount of headroom in here so i'm a little worried about it but it should be fine especially if this is going to be your first foray into the meat making um you know it'll be interesting to see what this amount of oxidation does you know it's been sealed in here so and there was like a small secondary ferment so this is mostly carbon dioxide but you know we'll see what we get an important thing to note about your sources of bottles is i think this used to be a limoncello bottle it is not
rated for carbonated maid so if you decide to do the uh sparkling mead route um make sure that you buy carbonation rated swing top bottles if you go swing top bottles i do recommend them they're very easy to use you don't have to get a corker you don't have to use corks they're a little more expensive than these bottles but honestly the um the convenience is worth it but if you just happen to have a bunch of friends who like to give you wine bottles um absolutely go out and get a corker and some corks
and just enjoy the free bottles um i know i had a lot of friends who volunteered to help me in the early days of my ring meat making by drinking a lot of wine just for you burly for you i'll to support your hobby i will i will drink more wine another thing to note when using these wine bottles is uh removing the labels kind of a pain and a half um honestly the best way to remove them i've found is just elbow grease and steel wool sure wd40 works really well but i mean you're
drinking out of these and you want to be sure that you get all of the wd-40 out if you do that yeah you'll notice there's still a little bit on the bottom here uh there's a layer of sediment here that this type of um siphon does keep out of the actual bottles and um you know there's going to be a little loss at every stage of the process it's what happens um but because there's no mashing process no sparging process no boiling process any of that you do actually end up retaining almost all of the
water and resources that you put into a meat like this now we'll move on to putting the corks on these and i don't think i'm gonna keep what's in here it's only about up to here um again there's loss at every stage of the process which is kind of what makes it difficult to know um how many bottles you are going to need like yes you know the volume of the fermenter you know the volume of the bottles but it's never a one-to-one process with the transfer uh that's just how it is um so let's
go ahead and get to that so this is what you're probably going to find you know as your first time wine corker so there are a lot of benefits to using uh corks and wine bottles uh when making need um most specifically is that it allows for micro oxygenation you know just a little bit of air transfer that will allow um sharp meads meets with a little bit too much up french brash meads uh it'll allow them to mellow out and sand off some of those rough edges over time um and can allow the mead
to express itself that's not to say that that doesn't happen in meets with airtight seals a little bit of oxygen invariably gets in and it takes a while to mix through and you know really affect the contents of the bottle but for this this is the deliberate slow introduction of oxygen through cork and you know you just place the cork here um and it narrows to go into the wine bottle you stick it on top you clamp underneath the lip of the wine bottle and just push it in it doesn't matter if just like a
little bit sticking out um sometimes it just doesn't meet the lip all the way that's fine um floor corkers are a lot nicer but a lot more expensive and if this is going to be your first need where you're cutting costs as much as possible and you know getting this instead of buying bottles you know using bottles that your friends use um you wouldn't be using a floor corker anyways um and i don't own one cause i don't cork a lot of my meats these days i shelled out a little extra money for some specialty
bottles and some nice nice tea top corks like you find in whiskey just because i don't really care for this part of the process it's kind of a hassle you have to put even pressure on both sides you know slowly push it in it can be a real pain in the butt [Music] and of course you're going to want to sanitize the channel that the corks go into you're going to want to sanitize the corks as well some people advise boiling the corks to both sanitize and soften them i've never really bothered with that one
of the downsides to using real cork is you may end up with cork taint at some point you know if you've ever heard of a wine being corked it happens like one in five at most wines will have cork tank of some kind i'm going to go ahead and test the abv on this one it should be the final final gravity [Music] and i won't know the abv right now i have to do math because i use a refractometer to like even it out um but editor verley is going to put it right here [Music]
ah it came out semi-dry honey forward the spices add a lot of body to this and the apple is just there to let you know it's there no this is not a very apple forward sizer i guess um cizer metheglin mix um you know just one apple went into this and soaked into the primary so the apple flavor is not going to be as pure as if i put it in a secondary which i wanted and there's a little bit of funk to it that came in fermentation which i also wanted you know there are
many times when you will want to put your flavoring components your adjuncts into secondary um if you want a pure representation of those flavors put them in secondary you know wait until fermentation's finished there's almost a butteriness to the mouth feel [Music] but it's still sharp it's still very youthful i think these two ones the corked ones are going to be fantastic in six months a year this one will be good to go and uh and i think done with all the changes in it in just a couple of months um just because the nature
of the uh airtight seal overall i've come a long way since that first meet that i made and if you decide to take this journey and start on this hobby or maybe even maybe you've done this hobby for a long time you will still benefit from trying again and again and again over the years iterating seeing what you like saying what you don't i've come such a long way from my very first mead that tasted sweet and bready and hint of hint of apple but it's been one of the more worthwhile journeys i've taken please
remember to comment down below if you'd like to see this type of content you know hit that subscribe button hit the notification bell uh and talk to me i i do as much as i can come into the comments and talk with you guys i want to hear if you're going to try a recipe or start making mead or restart making mead i love hearing that from you guys so please please please come chill with me in the comments uh chill with each other in the comments i've seen people helping each other out in the
comments and on this young small channel that really warms my heart uh this has been a great community um and i've sort of kept myself away from the broader made community i haven't really been in the forums i haven't really been watching other people's videos i've just been exploring this hobby as i find it and i've really been missing out honestly yeah there's some pretentiousness but what hobby doesn't have that there you know there are some snobs but i've been having a really good time truly so thank you for watching these videos and thank you
for being a good crowd of people uh cheers [Music] [Music] [Music] you
