How it all began:
I was at my cousin’s house, and we were just hanging out when she mentioned that she had made some honey wine or mead, as well as some cider. Both of which I enjoy. Her husband brews beer, and the three of us started talking about what it would take to make wine & bottle it. I could not believe how easy the wine making process was. For mead its basically as follows; mix honey & water add yeast and wait. Sounded like it was an easy way to get some cheap wine and I could bottle my homemade wine in anything I wanted.
If you know me you know I not only have an obsessive personality but know I’m a bit crazy too. Making my own mead was all I could think about. We would get talking about something else and a question about making wine would pop into my head and I would redirect the conversation. Fortunately from what I could tell my cousin’s husband was pretty passionate about making beer so he did not mind a little teaching. He showed me everything he used from the carboys to the thief. He even had a corny or ball-lock keg system and showed me that set up which was pretty sweet allowing him to have beer on tap as well as sparkling cider and wine.
The hooks were in now; all I wanted to do was start making my first batch of homemade honey wine.
I was set to hike the whole next week, which meant I would have a lot of time to think about making wine and bottling it. This is where my craziness shows its face. I had almost no knowledge about wine making and I wanted to try all sorts of different wines (I’m not going to list them here as build some suspense) I will tell you that I really like cherries, no I love cherries. So when I learned how easy wine making and bottling was I immediately thought “cherry mead!!”
My biggest concern in all this was where would I get my Wine Making Bottles?? I do not really like grape wine, so naturally I do not have a lot of wine bottles lying around. I figured that you could buy wine making bottles for a hefty price but I really don’t like paying for something I could get for little for no money, and wine making bottles fell into that category.
