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Big mead day! I bottled two batches and started three new ones.

First up: the London Fog mead is finally done! Turns out the way to get the tea flavor to come through was to just drop an infuser with a few grams of loose-leaf tea into the mead and letting it sit for a few weeks. Adding brewed tea just wasn’t enough, but it’s probably still worth doing since …

… I needed to boil some water anyway to get the lactose dissolved. It doesn’t taste like an actual London Fog, but the tea, honey, vanilla, and citrus all do come through separately.

Next: a weird experimental mead I’ve named “Bocheted Capsicumel”. It starts with a bochet—a mead brewed with caramelized honey and beer yeast—and then I added vanilla, cinnamon, oak, and the other title ingredient: morita chile peppers.

It’s very dry and beautifully complex. The cinnamon mostly comes through in the aroma, and the flavor is mostly vanilla and caramel. I was worried I’d have to sweeten it, but the oak rounded off most of the rough edges, and I like it dry!

Oh, and it’s a little spicy! Nothing too crazy, but the peppers make themselves known.

I ended up with ten 375ml bottles of the London Fog and (twenty 750ml bottles plus four 375ml bottles) of the Bocheted Capsicumel.

After bottling the ongoing projects, I started three more! A 1-gallon batch of donut peach mead, a 1-gallon batch of cherry mead, and a 5-gallon batch of blackberry mead.

Earlier this week, I picked up a box of _very_ ripe donut peaches from Collins Family Orchards and froze them. I understand that delicate peach flavors often don’t survive fermentation, so I expect to add more peaches in secondary, as well as maybe some vanilla and/or powdered acids.

And while I was grabbing those peaches, I couldn’t resist getting some late-season dark Lapins cherries. I also pitted and froze them to help them break down. Sweet cherries can sometimes end up producing medicinal flavors in meads, so I’m expecting to need some oak to mellow those out.