UPDATE: Two years between updates?!? Well, it's more like 19 months.  Anyway, we recently had another tasting and the results are up!

So there we were with 3 gallons of honey, 12 single gallon jugs and a weekend to spare. Thus, was the Great Sunnyvale Yeast Experiment of 2004 born! Okay, that's not exactly how it happened. We actually planned it out ahead of time, ordered some honey and jugs, and built a wooden box that wouldn't look out of place in a medieval dungeon. Okay, the box is only used to store tools (hey, that's where my belt sander got to) but we had to do something while we planned, right?

The plan was simple: Start 12 single gallon batches of mead from 12 different yeasts and drink liberally. The recipe is as follows:

Sorry for mixing metric and imperial units there. Also, the nutrients and energizer are news to me. I don't remember actually adding them, but there they are in the recipe. I do have an open bag, so I guess we added them. Who knew? Well I do know that no heat was used because it was a royal pain getting the honey to pour. The water was generic Albertson's store brand "mountain spring" water in the big 2.5 G containers.

The must was doled out mostly evenly into 12 jugs and shaken like the dickens. Then the yeasts were activated in clean plastic disposable bowls (except the White Labs liquid yeast). After the must as inoculated, they were plugged with an airlock (with a wee bit of vodka) and dropped in a huge freezer. This was 27 March, 2004.

The compressor on the freezer is out, but I hacked a smaller cooling unit into the top. It works quite well, but can't win when the external temperature is over 30C (about 85F). On warm days I would drop in a block of ice and the temperature would stay cool inside. While the temperature range would vary between 18C (65ish F) and 23C (72F, I think), all of the bottles were essential at the same temperature all the time. One day the temperature peaked at 26C because the plug fell out of the 12V adapter, but fermentation was well finished by then.

The meads were racked propty after they finished... No wait, that's not true. Once they fiished, we talked about racking them the next weekend. We were busy then so we aimed for the weekend after that. Except I wanted to go fly that weekend, so it was definatly the third week of sitting on the lees. But that weekend was some family thing for my co-conspirator so it was out too. Anyway, after a month or so on the lees, we racked the whole lot. As you would expect, yeasts like the EC-1118 were done long before then but the RX212 was just tuckering out.

On 29 August, after a couple more rackings, we bottled the mead. Each mead was bottled in six 375 mL bottles and one 750 mL bottle. We're a little short on the 71B-1122 due to a failed experiment with a pump (really a waste of time on 1G batches, but fun!) and some sloppy bottle handling on my part. I think we still have about four 375 mL bottles of it though. Below is a chart of the finished results. The results for #12 (RC212) may be a little off. It kind of slipped through the cracks at bottling time so wasn't measured until tasting. I didn't have my thermometer, but it was 'Room Temperature' when the reading was taken.

The original plan was to occupy a conferance room late one Friday night and have an informal tasting. This was starting to sound a little wierd (it's probably against a great number of regulations and maybe even a few laws) so we had to find a new place. Luckily our friend Ken volunteered his house for the tasting. You rock Ken.

With the plans changing daily, I dropped a line out on the Mead Lovers Digest to see if anyone would be interested with all of one week's notice. I got only one response (in the area), but for two people, so that worked out well. The day of the event, the whole area (except Ken's place) had a blackout so we had to make last minute changes to the food delivery plans, but the resulting pizza was really good.

At about 8:00pm, everyone had trickled in and some even brought mead. Below on the left you can see the usual suspects. From left to right, we have Homesteader Ken, Little-Bro Steve, Darn-Right-This-Tastes-Like-Water-I'll-Have-Another Prashant, Just-SmellySmelling Brad, This-Guy-Knows-Wine Ian, Co-Cospirator Brian. From the MLD, we were privileged to be joined by Eric and Li (back centre of the right photo). I handed out blank index cards to all, and we began.

Alright, we might have begun before quite everyone got there, but everyone showed up before the first sample was done.

The next one of these I do, I'm going to make up some standard judging cards of some sort. Some of the comments were quite helpfull, where others (and I'm not naming names) held cryptic messages like: "4.+ 3++". I've tried to decode them as best I can. Also, we din't exactly taste them in numerical order. UPDATE: I've changed the list order below to match the order in which we tasted the mead. I think this makes us look a little more coherent.

I've tried to make the most sense of the cards that I can. Some of them look like they may have run into some mead but I can still make them out. Any spelling errors in the above table are probably all my doing. Oh, sorry for changing everyone's "flavors" into "flavours" but I didn't notice until near the end.

As you can imagine, I still have quite a lot of mead left. We've agreed to meet again in about 6 months for the one year tasting. The date is (tentativly) set for the 15th or 16th of April, 2005. Just after taxes...