Bert (and others),
heck yeah, I've got mead. just under twenty gallons of cyser right now, and I'm hoping to bottle a substantial portion of that before I move out of town at the end of this month.
if you want to trade, I'm in Green Lake in Seattle, moving to Woodland north of Vancouver, WA. looks like you're in Bellevue, so it would be easier to get it before it goes south.
all twenty gallons in four carboys have the same raw ingredients, but in different proportions. I started with jonagold
apple culls that I pressed myself in 2008. added some crab apples at pressing for body as the dessert apples alone yield a thin cider. fermented that for a year with wild (maybe feral is more accurate) yeast. bottled and drank a couple of carboys. then I started adding honey to the remainder. it's raw blackberry honey from the Snoqualmie Valley. just a little bit at a time so fermentation kept humming along without getting out of control.
no hydrometer readings. no measuring of any kind, really. no boiling. no heating, for that matter. no filtering beyond a coarse filter when the honey was harvested. nothing added other than honey and apple juice. my guess is that there's about 20 pounds of honey split between the four carboys, but I couldn't say for sure. not exactly orthodox methods, but they've worked well for me in the past.
my previous batches of mead started tasting good after about a year of bulk aging and another year in the bottle. haven't tasted any of this batch yet, but I imagine it will be about the same. starts out a little hot, but that ages out in the bottle. been pretty dry previously, which is the style I like, and the apples add some pleasant acidity. back-sweetening is always an option if it puckers you up more than you like.
I would definitely be up for a trading. not a lot of spare time at the moment, so you would probably have to come to me.
)
