The most patient hobby

I bottled a couple of boozes this weekend: I fortified the dry seville orange mead with vanilla-orange instead of carbonating it, and bottled it like that. It added a lively fresh layer, I think it turned out ok. I also bottled the redcurrant wine, which is basically delicious juice-tasting.

I have an unknown port and a plum dessert wine upstairs to bottle still, plus assorted others that have been bulk aging forever: my perennial favorite, a cherry flanders-red style roselare sour; a sour crabapple cyser; an apple-quince cider; a strawberry-apple sour; and a lacto-sour berlinerweisse-style mead (when I did a cyser in this style it tasted like lemonade I swear).

The alchemy involved in brewing and aging is just... fun. You can aim for something and sometimes arrive exactly on-target or sometimes arrive somewhere unexpected. If you don't like it you wait and it will usually eventually be good. The flavours are recogniseable but more interesting and complex than the starting ingredients. And it's a hobby that benefits from waiting, from starting and stopping, from patience.

If I get two more things bottled then I'm making two rhubarb wines or meads this spring: a rose-rhubarb and a plain rhubarb or rhubarb mead.

I wonder if rhubarb is enough of a fruit to call that a melomel?

The most patient hobby

I bottled a couple of boozes this weekend: I fortified the dry seville orange mead with vanilla-orange instead of carbonating it, and bottled it like that. It added a lively fresh layer, I think it turned out ok. I also bottled the redcurrant wine, which is basically delicious juice-tasting.

I have an unknown port and a plum dessert wine upstairs to bottle still, plus assorted others that have been bulk aging forever: my perennial favorite, a cherry flanders-red style roselare sour; a sour crabapple cyser; an apple-quince cider; a strawberry-apple sour; and a lacto-sour berlinerweisse-style mead (when I did a cyser in this style it tasted like lemonade I swear).

The alchemy involved in brewing and aging is just... fun. You can aim for something and sometimes arrive exactly on-target or sometimes arrive somewhere unexpected. If you don't like it you wait and it will usually eventually be good. The flavours are recogniseable but more interesting and complex than the starting ingredients. And it's a hobby that benefits from waiting, from starting and stopping, from patience.

If I get two more things bottled then I'm making two rhubarb wines or meads this spring: a rose-rhubarb and a plain rhubarb or rhubarb mead.

I wonder if rhubarb is enough of a fruit to call that a melomel?