After 10 Days
I tasted the mead. It was cloudy and had a yeasty taste. I contacted Mistress Sorcha for advice - she said that yeasty smell/flavor was not an unexpected phenomenon for quick mead, and that I should taste it regularly and drink it when I liked the taste.
A Day or Two After That
Like it or not, it was time to go to Pennsic. I sterilized some plastic tubing and siphoned the mead into clean 2L seltzer bottles. I left one bottle plain, then added 1 tsp of orange extract to one bottle, and 1 tsp of strawberry to the third. Cheating, yes, but it covered up the yeasty taste a bit.
There was about a 24 oz that didn't fit into the bottles. My husband and I each had a wine glass, and I poured the remainder into a tumbler for him to enjoy while I was at War.
At Pennsic
"That's quick mead!" was the general consensus. It was indeed "alcoholic soda pop," very easy to drink. And that was good, because as hot as it was, it was rather nice to have something cold and somewhat sweet to drink at will.
Some more yeast precipitated out, but the clarity didn't improve a lot. Being jostled around in a cooler didn't help.
Returning Home, 5 Days Later
I found a crystal-clear tumbler of mead in the refrigerator when I came back, forgotten. There was significant sediment at the bottom of the glass.
The taste was... okay? In the same "light and sweet" class as the cloudy, yeasty meads, but with much less yeastiness. There were some other flavors sneaking in, but I'm not sure if that was inherent to the mead, or if it was the result of sitting in an open tumbler in the fridge for almost a week.
Lesson?
I probably could have left the mead go another week or so. OR I could have racked it, cooled to to clarify it, and racked it again, for a clearer, cleaner end product.
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