Batch 140: Bourbon-Barrel Aged Solera Mead

Another mead resulting from our mead solera! This brew has been getting increasingly delicious on its own over the last six-plus months, so we want to bottle a more or less plain instance. But I'm aging the mead I pulled off, first, on some oak cubes that have been sitting in bourbon for months now. Yum.

Ingredients in this batch

• Approx. 1½ gallon solera mead, mostly fermented.
• Approx. 1 oz (pre-soaking weight) Hungarian oak cubes, soaked for months in bourbon.

Procedure

Sanitized. Drained whiskey from oak cubes, letting them drip through a funnel and into a jar for half an hour. Pumped mead over them into two-gallon bucket with racking cane, letting the oak cubes sit in the mead. Popped on a top and filled an airlock.

Secondary fermentation began: 16 September 2018.
Bottling date: 13 October 2018
Final gravity: 1.000.
Estimated ABV: Approx. 12.5%.

Yield:

• 11 x 500 mL wine bottles; and
• 1 x 750 mL swing-top IKEA bottle;
• approx. 6 oz. mead in hydrometer tube.

Total: about 6.4 L, or approximately 1.7 gallons.