I’d never made mead before. I was like that cheezburger.com meme of the dog in the science lab with the caption “I have no idea what I’m doing.” So, I researched mead-making on about fifty different websites. I ordered a kit from Williams-Sonoma because I had a gift card and it came with most all the things I would need: a one-gallon “carboy”, a hydrometer, a siphon, pre-measured champagne yeast, and the floaty-stopper lid thing that lets the gas escape. I took all the comments I’d read saying mead was super-easy and forgiving as absolute, literal truth. I took a leap of faith and started making mead.
For my first ever batch, I tried a regular mead-mead, with just honey. I stirred the honey and water together, pitched the yeast, and watched with delight as the little floaty-stopper got all bubbly, just as it was supposed to. Of course, I eventually learned that I hadn’t started with nearly enough honey. I learned all this by watching my mead’s specific gravity drop below 1.0 and become about as dry as alum. In the process, however, I did learn how to use my hydrometer, as well as what specific gravity is and why it’s important. My most important learning, in the long run, was to ask the advice of an expert. His advice (and the additives, bottles, and “Zork” caps he sold me) are helping me to avoid glass bombs in my closet and to finish with a decent product my first time out. It occurs to me that many leaps of faith take this same path.
At the start, you think you have the tools and ingredients you need to be self-sufficient, but you wind up having to pick things up along the way. You learn as you go. You second-guess yourself. You seek guidance. You spend a lot of time sitting and waiting. You realize you didn’t do so badly that it’s not salvageable. You might need the help of another person to clear things up. In the end, you don’t always wind up with quite what you planned, but what you do have is still pretty darn good. Sometimes life and faith, like my mead, turns out a little on the dry side, but you always have opportunities to back-sweeten it a little so that, in the end, it turns out just fine.
