Mead Bottling

It is Mead bottling time here and so we are spending a few evenings taking care of this exciting task. Here are three of our meads just waiting to be transfered and corked. These are one gallon batches, which will yeild four wine bottles and some extra that we will "use" within the next few days or weeks. In the background you can see what we had bottled a few nights before.

Here you can see my wife, Dawn, siphoning the mead into a new bottle. This is keeping the lees, or yeasts out of the finished product. We save the lees as they can be used for the yeasts to start a new mead, or my favorite, using them for cooking.

Look at how clear that liquid is!
Here Dawn is writing labels out for the bottles, and if you look by her elbow you can see our "tasting" glass.
This is the corking machine. You put a cork into a little hole at the top and when you push down it squeezes and forces the cork into the bottle.
Push!
We hope to soon be starting some new batches, so I will be showing how you actually make mead in a future post.

Cheers!

Checkin Duane's Bees

Ok, here is my first blog here and it is not even about me! My brother-in-law, Duane, (pictured in his bee suit above), got a couple of bee hives last spring and I got some pictures of him two days ago adding some frames to the hives.The frames are where the bees make their comb to store the honey and also where the eggs are stored that the queen lays.These next three pictures are showing where the larve are in the comb which is capped off. This is called the Brood. There is quite possibly a new queen in their as well, just waiting to grow up and challenge mamma!


Here is some comb that was created not on the frame as they usually will, but on the lid of the box.

Sometime in the next few months these might be pulled out dripping with honey, and while this year most of it might need to be saved to get them through the winter, we are all looking foward to tasting honey made right here in our own backyard!