My first mead run; my first dunder

[MattHoll]

So, today I distilled mead for the first time. These were old mead, 14 and 15 years old, nearly old enough to legally drink themselves, and were in fantastic shape, but the corks for those bottles are rated for 8 years, and they’re going to shit. I’m a beer brewer, and when my son was born 15 years ago, I thought I wouldn’t have time to brew, so I did maybe 7 batches of mead before realizing that I’m not in love with mead like I am with beer. And I found time to keep brewing.
These two batches of mead were pretty big successes. Came out great. And no off flavors even after so long. They were no-boil meads made with honey I bought straight from the bee keeper, the honeys—rosemary and chestnut. So, they originally had little bits of bee in them. Unfiltered, and packed with flavor. None of that five gallon bucket of honey stuff I see folks distilling on YouTube (which I have no problem with, but nobody's giving me buckets of honey!), but more like artisinal honeys. The rosemary was pretty mild and fruity, at 16.5% abv. Fermented with Lalvin QA23. The chestnut was crazy packed with flavor, some lovely sherry notes after aging so long, but a silky mouthfeel and some nuttiness and tannins. That one was 17% abv. Fermented with Lalvin D47.
All told, I had 31 bottles (750ml), a few of them only partially filled, sitting in the fridge, the rest still unopened, laid on their sides to keep the corks wet for longer than a decade. None of the bottles went off. They were all in great shape. But opening them was a motherfucker. I only managed to cleanly open 15 bottles. The other 16 ended up with me having to use a screwdriver to jam the broken remnants of cork into the bottle. Took a while. The corks for those 16 basically crumbled when I was trying to open the bottle ever so gently.

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I poured the mead through a sieve. For any brewers out there, I used three hop spiders stacked into each other to catch any cork or debris so it wouldn’t go into the boiler.

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I poured gently and reserved the lees from the 15 bottles that opened cleanly for later use, which I’ll explain later.
The mix should have been around 16.5% abv, but I didn’t bother to measure it.
Volume was 21.5 liters.

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I decided to do a single run. Don’t see any reason for a stripping run with that small amount. I used a Digiboil 35l with a Kegland Alcoengine copper pot still. I started the run slow. After heating up with both elements, I shut off the 500 watt element and ran only the 1900 watt element, at around 50% wattage with a power controller. Early on, I went for a steady drip until I got into the hearts, then I sped up slightly, to a pencil lead stream, or slightly slower than that.
Foreshots came off at ~75% abv. I ran it down to ~11% and collected about 7.6 liters or thereabouts.
This is only my third run. The previous two I did in one day, 16.5 hours of distilling, last Sunday. And those were all-feints runs, and 95% tails. This mead run was totally, wildly different. It was pretty tasty for the entire run, which is odd. The foreshots and the next three 220 ml jars are likely not making the cut, but that fourth jar might well be in the blend. And jar 23 might be the turning point for cutting off tails, but even after that, there were some jars that had this crazy waxy, grainy thing going on that was amazing, with some buttery mouthfeel, and some interesting mineral stuff going on that wasn’t at all offensive. I didn’t get to any oily runoff. None of that.I sipped straight off the last jar and thought, hell, that’s actually decent. But by then, runoff was so fucking slow that I said, yeah, I’ll stop there. I guess that out of the 7.6 liters I collected, I might well use 4 liters for the blend, but I’ll see tomorrow.
The jars are airing out now.
After I wrapped up, I hooked up my counterflow chiller to the Digiboil, and pumped about 3 liters of the backset into a Fido jar chilled down to 20º C. I’ll use those three liters for a sugarhead in a week or ten days or so. I put that into my chest freezer that I use for beerly things, set to a bit above freezing.
The rest of the backset, which amounted to about 10 or 11 liters after some losses to pump hoses and the floor and all that, was pumped into a 15 liter demijohn.

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I’ll use that to seed a dunder pit, in a demijohn. I don’t want to use a bucket, don’t want that plastic in contact with the low pH over a long period, don’t want that heavy exposure to air from both the plastic breathing and the massive opening. I’ve made a shit ton of sour beers over the years, and know that I don’t want that heavy oxygen exposure. Too much acetic acid from that air, to which I say thee nay. Anyway, once I pumped that backset over to the demijohn, I added:
• 1 tablespoon of calcium carbonate to buffer the pH over time.
• 4 grams of Fermaid E, which is what I can get here, and has DAP in it to feed the
• Lambic dregs from a bottle of 3 Fonteinen Cuvee de Miel (a Lambic made with honey, so the wild bugs in there are already acclimated to honey) and Boon Oude Geuze, both of which are amazing if you haven’t tried them.
• 100 grams of Billington’s Molasses Sugar, to feed the bacteria and wild yeast in the lambic dregs
• And the lees from the 15 bottles of mead from which the corks popped out cleanly

I’ll store this in my beer room in the basement where I have loads of sour beers aging and bottled beers and whatnot. The dregs will go slow and steady and I’ll feed them in a few months with more sugar or some crushed grain. I won’t throw any goat heads or dead bats into the dunder demijohn, though. The intention there is to use this for a rum next spring/summer. I do long-aged sour beers a lot, and like what that long stretch of time does with beers, so figured I’ll do a slow burn dunder “pit.”
Sorry so long-winded. That was my Friday. I work at home and told myself to fuck off, since I’m my own boss. And took the day off to do this. Sunday, I’ll brew an all-grain whiskey mash with Golden Promise and Maris Otter, ferment that with White Labs London Fog, and use the spent grains for a sugarhead with that same Billington’s Molasses Sugar, and when it comes time to run that sugarhead, I’ll add feints and backset from this mead run to make things more interesting.
Any and all comments and ideas welcome. I hope all your lives are kicking ass and you're happy. Cheers from the Balkans.