Lost Art of the Day
Or, "What My Husband Did This Weekend".
This is a 50-gallon bourbon barrel. It has been used (post-bourbon) to brew a batch of beer at one of those "brew your own" establishments, where you show up and they supply the ingredients. Now it is being used to brew a huge batch of the variety of mead called cyser, mead made with apple cider.
This weekend my husband, with the help of friends in his homebrewing club and the local SCA canton, filled it with two five-gallon pails (120 pounds) of honey and forty gallons of no-preservatives-added apple cider. And yeast.
Now it is sitting in our house, fizzing.
This makes me very nervous. I have seen many a carboy foam over in the early stages of fermentation. Proto-mead makes a very sticky mess. This is about 45 gallons of proto-mead. Sitting in my house.
Usually my husband puts the five-gallon glass carboy on a big cookie sheet to catch any foam-over. As you can see, what is sitting under this barrel is -- a towel.
My husband claims that because of the curvature of the barrel, if it does foam over, it will run down the side and drip on the towel.
Boy, I sure hope he's right.
Labels: mead
posted by Alwen | 9:47 AM
4 Comments:
If I help clean up any fizz-over, do I get to help drink the end results?
Yay, mead!
A whole barrelful... that's pretty damn impressive...
Tell him to make dandelion wine next year.
Are you going to lay on your back with your head under the barrel? :)
Sorry, he says, "Dandelion wine, flheph!" (I can't spell the sound he made!) Seems there was a really bad batch of dandelion wine made when he was a kid.
Julie will have to fight me for the spot under the barrel, I loves me some ciser!
Honestly, that makes me a little nervous too. You know what I would do? I would put a black plastic garbage bag over the top and tape it down at the ends, just in case it does explode, that might limit the scope of the damage.
We had a little discussion about that last night, regarding how tight the bung (boy, I don't think I ever typed that word before!) should be in the bunghole (that one, either).
Because I said if it was in there tight, and pressure built up and it shot out, being that I'm in a dome-shaped room, it would go "ka-ping, zing, doink!" as it caromed off the ceiling and wanged me right in the head!
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