The Colony Meadery's Black mead is back on Black Friday for a limited time. The popular blackberry-blackcurrant mead is rich, dark and complex and released in very small batches every so often.
The Colony Meadery, the Lehigh Valley’s award-winning producer of fermented honey, recently announced a partnership with Stroudsburg’s Banter’s Hard Cider that will result in a chance for more customers to try each company’s beverages.
Greetings friends in mead! Our construction is under way and moving along nicely. It is now starting to look like something!
Starting a meadery - like many DIY technical projects - is mostly an exercise in learning how not to do things. You spend hours trying to think of everything, and then 10 minutes in, find something for which you did not prepare. Consequently, the rule of thumb is to expect a Pareto distribution (aka the 80-20 rule): You'll spend x amount of time on the first run-through of something, and then the same amount of time doing the rest of the same task. First PID: 1 hour. Other six PIDs: 1 hour total. You get the idea.
So you might, for example, be installing fittings into fermenters, and then realize that there's no obvious way to get the other end of the fitting five feet up into a 100-gallon fermenter.
Nonetheless, things are coming along nicely. The glycol system is completely rigged up.
We've even begun naming our fermenters. The primaries start at the beginning of the alphabet and go down; the secondaries will start at Z and work up. Our two 100-gallon tanks are Agnes and Bertha, followed by Cleveland, Donald and Edgar. The only secondary named so far is Willy. Suggestions are, of course, welcome.
