Took my initial gravity reading of 1.132 before adding the yeast. My fellow brewers will be like, “that seems high.” And they’d be right! If the yeast were to consume all that sugar, it’d end up at 17-18% ABV, but fortunately the yeast I’m using (Lalvin 71B) should stop before it hits that level.

That’s one offended boy right there

Right now it’s just must (no yeast). I added some campden tablets to get myself a clean slate (microbially at least). Tomorrow the yeast goes in, then it ferments!

Mead batch #2! This one’s just a classic honey mead, made with ~16lbs of Shipwreck Honey’s blackberry blossom honey (they’re local for me, and their honey is excellent!)

So, less concerning than with beers, sodas, or sparkling wines, but still something to watch for.

It can be an issue, especially since I did have to sweeten it after it finished fermenting. To guard against that I added a stabilizer a little while back to prevent further fermentation, then held it in a growler with an airlock long enough to be confident there was no more.

Also: if you look at the corks of the 3 front bottles in the photo above, you can see where I had to calibrate my corker.

The fig mead has been bottled! Only got 8x 375ml bottles. I’d expected 10, so all the inexpertly racking back and forth ended up losing roughly a whole wine bottle’s worth, but this was a learning experience! I’m going to age it for ~6 months before opening one of the bottles to taste it.

I’ve got some family in Largo and Clearwater that are stocking up and readying the dogs for evacuation. I’m worried about what they’ll find when they get back, but I’m going to sleep a lot easier with them out of the path and away from coastlines.

One of these days I’m going to write the strongly-typed shell of my dreams, and in that world “absolute path” and “relative path” will be different, incompatible data types. Sure, you convert a relative path to absolute, but you must _write out_ (cwd() + rel_path) or whatever.