Thursday 27 March 2014

making mead

It's another late, quick blog.  I was busy earlier, and since the Systems Administrator is up in town for a reunion curry with old colleagues, I knew I'd be able to sit down at the kitchen table with my laptop when I got in from the beekeepers' monthly meeting without seeming anti-social.  The SA is accustomed to living with the blog, and will enquire genially 'whether you've blogged yet' before settling down to read or watch TV through headphones if the answer is 'not yet', but it still seems unfriendly to disappear out for the first part of the evening, and then behind your keyboard as soon as you walk in through the door.

I have been learning how to make mead.  It sounded much simpler and more achievable than it did the previous time I went to a mead-making lecture, when I emerged completely ignorant, and more confused than I had been at the beginning.  I think the previous lecturer assumed we all knew the basics of home wine-making, which I don't, whereas tonight's speaker assumed that we knew nothing.  He gave us mead making made simple, so no citric acid or any of the other umpteen chemical additives I thought I would have to go and get from a specialist supplier.  This was natural mead, made with honey, water, ordinary baking yeast and flavoured with oranges and spices.  The only chemical needed was Milton for sterilisation.  I'm OK with Milton, I use it on the ice cream machine.

Our tutor claimed not to know the capacity of the demijohn he was using, but it must have been around the gallon mark.  In it he put four pounds of honey, one orange cut into eight slices like at half time in hockey, approximately twenty-five raisins (which apparently add body to the mead), cloves, mixed spice, nutmeg and a cinnamon stick, plus one teaspoon of baking yeast.  He filled it most of the way up with bottled water, shook it vigorously, fitted an airlock, and said that after three or four days the initial fermentation would be complete, after which we should add water to fill it right up, and leave it somewhere dark for a month or so until all signs of fermentation had finished.  Then we should syphon the contents into another demijohn, leave it to settle, and bottle it.  Mead started now would be ready to drink by Christmas, and it would keep for up to four years or so.  It was OK to use old honey, or not the best honey.

And that was it.  He made up a second batch in which the demijohn was replaced by a large mineral water bottle, and the airlock by a plastic bag with one very small hole poked in it, held on with a rubber band.  Apparently there are lots of recipes on the internet.  He assured us that the oranges would shake out of the demijohn very easily, and an audience member said that she had done a similar recipe, and used a bucket for the initial fermentation stage, then filtered the oranges and lumps of spice out when transferring it to a demijohn to complete its fermentation.  There seemed a general consensus in the room among those who had tried it that mead was not that difficult, though one member had managed to punch a hole in his parents' hot water tank in his youth, putting bottles of fermenting liquid closed with screw caps in the family airing cupboard. (He did go on to have a successful career as an industrial chemist, so his youthful enthusiasm for experimentation stood him in good stead in the end).

Before going to the lecture I cooked and ate a small red cabbage I'd had sitting around in the cupboard for ages, as the right moment to inflict it on the SA never arose.  I adore red cabbage, fried in caramelised sugar and simmered with wine vinegar, raisins and caraways seeds, but the SA is not so keen.  And before that I managed to fit in my Pilates exercises, load the washing machine and set the dishwasher, make another rhubarb pudding because the first one was so nice, and weed almost all of two beds in the vegetable garden, as I am once again indulging in the fantasy that this year I might grow some vegetables.

And before all of that I went into Colchester to sort out an ISA for the current year, which I had not got round to doing before because interest rates were so pathetically low, but it still seemed worth locking in the tax allowance for future years, when rates might be higher.  I am an existing customer of Halifax, and was expecting this to be an extremely swift process, since I already knew I wanted the two year fixed rate, they already knew who I was, and it should have been a case of the Halifax filling out a very simple online form, and my writing a cheque.  It actually took over half an hour, most of which consisted of me sitting watching the Halifax representative going round and round in circles on her computer, because it would not let her open the form she wanted. Everything you have heard about IT system problems at RBS is almost certainly an understatement.

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