Bottling mead during Labor Day conflagration

So in between checking Facebook and various other news sites around the interwebs for updates on the 35,000-acre Bastrop wildfire on Labor Day, I decided it was high time for me to bottle some mead. For those of you keeping score at home, you'll remember that back in July I racked a 6-gallon batch of mead into 4 gallons of fig melomel and 3 gallons of prickly pear melomel. The airlocks on each fermentation vessel continued bubbling at a slow rate through the first week of August, and once all signs of fermenting ceased, I let them sit another few weeks 1) for good measure and 2) because I just didn't get around to bottling. This is what I ended up with:

I'm not entirely sure where I went wrong, but I sterilized far too few bottles for the amount of mead I had. Halfway through bottling the fig melomel I realized my error, sterilized another nine bottles, and still ended up three bottles short. I guess I expected the fruit to cut into the final volume more than it did. In any event, I finished the evening with 17 bottles of beautiful golden fig melomel, 14 bottles of beautiful crimson prickly pear melomel (three of which were merely washed and cleaned rather than sterilized, so they're in the fridge for early drinking) and a single bottle of mongrel, roughly half and half fig/prickly from leftovers from both batches. Having learned from my apfel wein experiment that I tend to enjoy carbonated fruit wines more than still, I opted to try my hand at my first bottle-conditioned meads to make with the bubbly. I added one teaspoon of granulated sugar to prime the bottles (dosage if you're a wine snob) which should effect a nice carbonation in the finished product.

As for the taste, it's too early to tell with the fig. I only had a small taste, and it seemed clean with not a lot of the harsh fusel alcohols that have marred my previous efforts. Beyond that, I'll have to wait and let it age a bit so it can mature. There was not a lot of fruit in the scent or flavor, but it was nice and dry with a good tannin body. The prickly pear, on the other hand, was quite mature and drinkable. There was a bit of harshness right away, but as the mead breathed for a few minutes this went away quickly. The prickly pear was very dry as well, and had a definite fruity profile, almost plum-like character. The tannins, which I'd been afraid of with my earlier effort at prickly pear mead several years ago, really help with the body of the melomel. If I had to characterize it, I'd say it tasted very much like a dry white merlot. That sounds strange, I know, but it had a similar color, flavor and mouthfeel. There's still that honey flavor underneath it all, but it's quite subtle, certainly not thick and syrupy like so many people expect with mead. This may turn out to be my best effort yet.


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