"Djarum Black" Mead Beta Version

I have a really great piece of artwork that I would like to use as a label for this bottle. It's called "Father-Hating and Shame" and features a lovely young lady in the classic goth-club pose: one hand over the forehead pinching a clove, and an angsty grimace creeping over her perfectly painted features.

Ingredients:

3 lbs mesquite honey (for that extra smoky flavor)

1-2 tbsp whole cloves (for that rich Djarum Black smell)

3 whole star anise (freshly broken up, like that torrid relationship with your one true love who died of consumption and left you weeping over his gravestone where you were found half-frozen by the groundskeeper in the wee hours of the morning)

1 gallon of water (preferably from the shower where you washed yourself over and over after encountering that really horrid guy and his underage cat-girls who were pathetically attempting to recruit attendees for a "Vampire Flirting Party for the Gothic Kink-Curious" because, even after you left the club, you still just didn't feel clean*)

A couple pinches of Lapsang Souchong tea (I used Twinings - tastes gross as a tea, but is amazingly smoky in that crowded alley kind of way)

a quarter of a package of Lalvin D37 wine yeast

1 tsp Fermax yeast nutrient

Tools:

1-gallon hillbilly jug

1 terlet-shaped gas-trap and cork

1 giant-ass pot

Siphoning equipment that does not suck**

Start the water in the pot. As the water begins to get hot, slowly stir in the honey. Simmer and skim off the scum, and set honey-water aside to cool down. As the honey is cooling, carefully deconstruct a corner of 2 Lapsang Souchong teabags (haha, teabags). Empty out the tea and set aside. Fill each teabag with the cloves and star anise. Pinch in a little bit of the reserved Lapsang Souchong, then tie off each teabag and toss 'em into the pot. When the must reaches around 65 degrees, stir in the yeast and yeast nutrient. Siphon everything into the hill-folk jug and toss the spice-bag in. Stuff it in a warm dark place (Oh, you know where I'm talking about. Yeah, that's right. In that cabinet next to the sink). More updates as progress dictates!

Edit: Ladies and gentlemen, there was a report of a mead-splosion last night some time between the hours of 11pm and 8am the next morning. Dear jebus, I had no idea that yeast could be so damn finicky. Last night I went to sleep and the mead was doing virtually *nothing*. This morning when I opened the cabinet to check on it, I found that the gas trap was filled to the brim with mead, the yeast was bubbling up like crazy, and everything else in the cabinet was soaked in a sticky brown layer of proto-mead. WTF? I guess I put a little too much must into that one-gallon container (I filled it up to just below the neck). Let it be known that the above recipe makes *slightly* more than 1 gallon's worth of mead, but overfilling anything is just a bad idea. Note to self - use a bigger container next time.

Edit: I racked after 3 weeks, during which time I removed the teabags filled with spice and stabilized 2 weeks after that using slightly less than 1/2 teaspoon of stabilizer per gallon. I then forgot about it for roughly 2 months, until which time I was battling stove gremlins and stumbled across the carboy that I'd stashed in the cabinet next to the oven. This led to a grand bottling adventure (deftly avoiding the Horror of the Tuna-Smelling Sink With the Broken Garbage Disposal), from which resulted a delightfully lightly carbonated clovey-burney-tasty-bubbly good mead best served chilled. A+ for this recipe, I would definitely do this again. I bet this is what it's like to lick a goth.

* True story - just ask Steve. He had the misfortune of having to set up his art booth next to that tool at the 2008 New England Darksidewalker's Ball.

** Haha, fictional. All siphoning equipment I've used sucks. Find me an autosiphon that keeps its seal for more than 3 rackings and bottlings, and THEN we'll talk.