Only proper wine corks are good for proper mead. I mean, yeah, there is place in our life for fermented honey solution that is consumed fast, but proper mead should age like expensive wine. It’s more noble than wine, after all!

Bottling mead thus is always a challenge. I’ve tried all kinds of methods, or course beer caps - and especially swingtops - just start leaking at best in few years. Compouns corks too, and, being low grade stuff, they are often stinky themselves. The only exception are belge bottles and fat compound corks for braggots, if corked belge way, they occasionally leak some liquid at first, but then seal themselves for good.

Even higher grade corks tend to degrade over the years. Highest grade does not degrade. I’ve just negotiated a sample of fancy corks from Portugal, about 1eur/cork, highest grade. They look really good and will probably work, but min order is 6000 and they have to be repackaged sterile. Good thung I have sterile line, but 6000? It’s 10x more than all bottles I have now! I could place them in my webstore in small bags? Would someone be buying them?

I was looking into alternatives, but nothing so far looks promising. I’m thinking about turning other wood types on a lathe, but that will probably result in a disaster.

So ok, these are just quasiparticles. Yes, we could have quasiparticles that behave like actual particles. Yes, it’s just an abstraction. Yes, we can go batshit crazy in abstraction space and come up with anything.

This reminds me how some folks in ScientificAmerican modeled black hole with a vortex in water and found supersonic wave, which brought them to conclusions about possibility of passing through event horizon in actual black hole. bah.

In other words, when do I get some money to build a quantum quasiparticle computer and finally hack elliptic cryptography?

Though, as Rice alumni, can’t deny still always awesome publicity of that university.

Vangers 2.0

Usually not worth it; you’ll need to gently distill (in proper glass, this is important) the beer like it is done for ABV measurement and measure density of leftovers. Or do quantitative chromatography. You’ve got to know hands-on chemistry real well for this. Let me know if you need the procedure.

Only once I’ve got yeast staggered by lemon juice addition, and that happened in secondary fermentation. If there is enough sugar (and, if I recall correctlt, there was added sugar in these ferments), they’ll keep going. Acidity that slows them down for real is much higher, like what acetobacteria do. Yeast still thrives in bread starters and combucha, and those are sour!

There you go, now we know the answer for “what was thinking that person who chopped the very last tree on Easter island?”

Gudim and Nazim - best contemporary meme artists!

Was it pulpy? Particles tend to stabilize liquid interfaces.

I make and sell mucrocloning kits in anticipation to see this happen

Then it’s effectively braggot. Embrace the froth, you are cookin!

Yeast does this if they are in really sweet spot for sugar, nitrogen, microelements, temperature, and pH. Almost always happens in braggot (once shot into ceiling with lock, was quite a mess), also if you add yeast fertilizer. I think I saw this reported reproducively for slightly over 23C lager yeast. And, well, insufficient headspace might be a problem. Don’t worry, at least yet.

Are you boiling them? Why?

Then it’ll totally ferment like crazy, I did this with honey and quartered oranges.

So are you adding sugar this time or not?

Indeed, I had a stall once in a melomel with just a few lemons in secondary. Not a big deal since it was secondary, and residual sweetness counterbalanced the tartness nicely. Got really quickly really clean though.

I would say using just the skins for flavor is much more feasible. Also I quarter citrus, slicing them like this is just asking for lots of mush at cost of laborous slicing.

Ciders and cysers are perfect drinks for Gravmas celebration! Although myself I’m planning citrus melomel for the evening, brings up childhood memories. Tried to share photos of 3x decoction weisen from the eve, but lost fight to foam miserably, for it was not the first bottle for the evening.

My wife said that Christmas specials should be made on Christmas for the next one. Sounds legit. I think that’d be my plan for now.

Oh, sure, let’s maybe keep them in hands of governments and corporations, those always behave responsibly, right?

Awesome, I should totally start making these things too and place them in my microcloning and brewing yeast webstore. This dude is a hero of our biopunk culture, weird that I haven’t heard about this before!

U-tube is just a glorified pendulum. But using this classical U shape for liquids is worth it. Pendulums is how you measure mass if gravity is too low.

I know some people inverted U-tube and immersed piezo fork into liquid. Then they struggled with reflections and setting feedback right or making sweep practical enough. And then there is electrical connections going into the probe through liquid surface, which is another concern. Still, in batch process (and all brewing is batch process) immersible probe should be much faster and washable than flow-through, I guess.

Oh, got carried away and missed another question. I’m actually throwing all good quality stuff in melomels, there are no favorites really. Other than Vaccinium uliginosum (English words for berries are terribly misleading, used interchangeably for pretty much all berries of same color - so these are usually called “blueberries”, but that’s not what is called “blueberries” in USA, for example) berries that result in something that shames wine made of grapes - so much cheaper, literally grows in most unfarmable places, melomel tastes similarly but better, and no pretense about “grape locality” and “northern slope” - just good stuff, every time.

Cranberries and lingonberries are kind of staple berries here, rowan is less known but also abundant and tastes great. Other hidden treasures I’ve found include hawthorn, ribes, and (very unexpectedly) hippophae. Now it’s time for imported citrus fruits (skins are best part for melomel) but I’m all out of started base mead (and almost out of space).