Bottling and Tasting Mead (Mead Making Part 2)

Four weeks ago I showed how to make mead. In this video I will show you how I bottle a batch of mead made six months ago following a similar recipe. The most important thing in home brewing is cleaning and sanitizing, so I take a lot of time showing how to do this. Then, after the mead has been bottled, I treat myself to my first ever glass of mead. I hope you will have fun watching this video. Maybe it even inspires you to make your own mead or wine or even beer at home. If it did, please let me know in the comments what you will be making!

You can download the recipe for this mead by clicking this link.

Video transcript:

Hello ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Tony Needs Hobbies. In the last video I showed you how I made a batch of mead and I promised to give you an update about that batch of mead in the next video. Well, here we are. This is the next video and this is the batch of mead. The update is that I transferred it into a glass bottle and that’s about it. But this video would be really short if I would only give you that update so I also promised you to show you how I bottle a six-month-old batch of mead in this video, and do a little bit of a tasting afterwards. Have fun watching!

To clean and sanitize the bottles and corks I am going to use a mixture of citric acid and sulfite. To clean all the other materials I am using this sanitizing oxidizing agent that I used while preparing the mead. I made about 14 liters of mead so if I divide that by 0.75, I will end up with around 20 bottles that’s why I will prepare 22 corks. Now I will set this aside and prepare the bottles.

Now it’s time to add the sanitizing agent and stir it all up. Bottling my first batch of mead is a special  occasion. That’s why I got this one and a half liter magnum bottle. I’ll have a huge amount of fun sharing the contents with my friends. I’m very happy now. This stuff is beautiful. The color, it’s amazing. I’m looking forward to putting it in a bottle.

I will transfer the mead into this bucket, then I’ll add a bottling tube right here and transfer the mead into bottles. Be sure to check that the valve is closed. To check if fermentation has finished I take another gravity reading. It reads 0.996, that means the fermentation has finished and it’s a very dry mead.

So I drank almost this whole glass now, I’m getting a little bit tipsy and the reason is that I cannot get the following sentence on video: “Let’s taste a little bit…” Alright, let’s taste a little bit before starting with bottling. It’s very good, it has a lot of honey sweetness to it, but it’s not too sweet at all. It’s actually a little bit on the dry side. Let’s continue bottling.

Alright, that was a full day of hard work. Time to pour myself a little bit of a drink. Take a look at that golden goodness! The color is absolutely perfect and it’s crystal clear, especially when you compare it to this bottle of mead. Let’s have a taste…

I’m no professional wine taster at all but this stuff tastes good. It’s actually a little bit more dry than I expected it to be being a honey based drink but it’s very refreshing and herbal and it’s really good.

Unfortunately the glass is empty… The bottle is empty, so that concludes this video. I hope you had a bit of fun watching it and maybe I even inspired you to make your own drinks at home. Please let me know in the comments below if I did and what you will be making and please subscribe to my channel to not miss any updates of future projects that I will be doing. For now I would like to thank you for watching.

Bye, bye!