Well I decided that the Jaom needed to be bottled. Its just a bit over 1 gallon so only need a few bottles. But I was soaking them earlier when I was racking the other mead.

So I got it racked to the bottling bucket, and she sure looks pretty clear.

But whoa, what an alcohol bite to it. I would swear its tequila or something. This is gonna havta sit for a while and mellow out. But is not dry at all. Seems just a mite thin. but that maybe the alcohol affect. gonna get these put away till Christmas and see how they are then.

So today I decided that the mead needed to get racked off. This was the ginger mead that I made last month. I gotta say when I opened that lid. Wow, just what I wanted to smell. Nice and clear.
But the 04 yeast that I used wasnt very compacted like I thought it was gonna be. Just kinda floating at the bottom. We did manage to get it racked fairly clean though.

We started with a OG of 1.064 and here going into secondary we are sitting at 1.016. I was expecting to go a bit lower but she might chew it down a bit more.
But I gotta say this is one tasty mead. Got the nice ginger taste, but not hot like they can get.
sweet but just starting to get a very little dryness to it. The body is somewhere between not so full but not thin. (what?).
It it did not change at all from where it is right now, I would call it a success.

Am thinking about bottling the JOAM mead from Feb. today too. Everyone says to let it go 6 months or when the oranges drop, but that just seems to be too long on the yeast.
I’ll take a look at it while the bottles are soaking.

Got an email that Matt (or @revmra) up Oconto falls was going to be brewing, so called up Tim from TCM and we took a road trip.
He was making and all grain Alt with spalt hops. I guess this was his first brew in almost a year, but still had his technique down.

One of the reasons I like to watch others brew is learing other techniques. Matt’s sparge is kinda a batch sparge and sorta fly sparge. kinda batch because he pulls the wort fairly quickly, but kinda fly like because he is topping off the tun every now and then. And as you can see, thats some seriously clear wort coming outta there.

When we get to the boil, we got to enjoy the smells of the spalt. Dont think I have smelled hops like this before. Somewhere between a Fuggle and a Christmas tree. Pretty much made my mind up right there that I am going to be using these hops in the near future.

Speaking of hops. While the boil was going on he was showing off his awesome hops. Goldings. Got a bunch of good growing tips that we are gonna incorporate, and we were able to get a couple of stray roots from him. More hops is a good thing.

Kinda rainy, but it was another good brew day, and of course great samples. Road trips are great. Thanks for the great day Matt.