The Best of a Bad Situation

After a lovely visit from my sweet friend Granny Annie I got to work on two one gallon batches of mead. What's bad about that? Well ... yesterday I harvested and prepared a half-pound of Melissa officinalis (lemon balm) for steeping overnight. This morning I added green tea, lemon juice, cooked banana and 3 pounds of delicious local honey. What's so bad about that? Well, I hydrated the wine yeast, got a PA reading and got to vigorously stirring oxygen into the mead-to-be. Thing is, for my one gallon wine-n-mead batches, I start the primary fermentation in glass jars and normally I stir with my plastic wine spoon, and today I was stirring with my stainless steel spoon, that is until ...

CRACK!

And I watched with a stunned despair as what would have been five bottles of delicious Melissa mead cascade down the kitchen drain. So sad. So very, very sad.

Even so I was glad that I was stirring the batch in the sink. All I could really do is sigh a blessing down the drain and out into the deep, dark depths of the septic system. Such is life.

But I had yeast waking up on the counter, so I had to act fast! I had some rose petals and earl grey tea leaves steeping and bananas cooked for another project, so I measured out three pounds of honey, heated it with as little water as I could get away with, added cool water, the rose infusion, strained tea, mashed bananas and stirred it with the plastic spoon. I pitched the yeast with a cheer of love and gratitude. What else could I do?

I'll be naming this batch "Emergency Mead." It will be as close to a "straight" mead as I've ever made. In any event I continued with the rose petal batch, making the adjustments for the stolen elements. Both are bubbling away nicely.

And me? I'm delighted and grateful to have sweet friends to share it with. When the time comes. Slainte!