Many, many moons ago in the Fair Barony of Three Mountains, my lord set up an A&S night on the basics of making mead. As luck would have it, and in the panic of trying to teach how to make it from the recipe and not realizing that English and American gallons are different, the mead was started with *way* too much honey to water. It fought its way through the initial ferment, and then settled down to a slow bubble….very slow bubble…and slower bubble… and sloooooower…. Months later the gentle in whose house the carboy resided needed the space it was taking up, and in a fit of holiday cleaning engendered by his lady wife, put the carboy into the basement…. The cold basement…on the floor….

Well!

About three years later, said couple asked my lord if he wanted his carboy back and they decanted about a gallon of the not-very-alcoholic and totally dead mead.

He, having learned the difference in the meantime between the two sorts of gallons, realized that the mead needed more water and a starter yeast and it would probably actually finish what it tried to start.

So….

He added water in the right proportions, made a starter batch of yeast, and with great glee we anticipated having a lovely batch of mead for 12th night…no, Janeltis’ Feast…no, maybe September Crown… well, maybe for Yule? Or next Janeltis’, or July Coronation? Or the next 12th Night? … I don’t remember how many years passed and how many samples had reduced the full carboy by a couple of gallons (I think it was a couple of years…) but the mead finally stopped holding pressure. In a warm July we bottled and capped and anticipated the well-aged mead for Yule.

But….

We had a warm August… one afternoon I was in the front room when I heard a “pook” sound from the kitchen. Going to check, I walked into a puddle of bubbling mead on the floor. Several bottles had blown their caps and decanted themselves….

<sigh>

So, the floor was mopped and the surviving bottles were put into the fridge to hopefully kill off the yeast so that we could put them back out when the weather cooled and *then* they would age.

Except…

…a month later I was making preserves and needed fridge space to put ingredients and several bottles got pulled out of the fridge and set on the cold stovetop of our gas stove. They got moved back and forth several times across the stovetop and then, on a warm day, pushed *all* the way to the back of the stovetop…over the place under the metal stovetop where the pilot light kept a spot nicely warm… and sat there for a couple of hours while other things were going on….

….You see where this is going, don’t you? Just wait….

I walked back into the kitchen from where I had been working and the bottles caught my eye. Something was different. They looked a little odd because we always seat corks all the way into the bottle and these were showing an ½ inch or more of cork!

I went over to investigate…bad move….I went to pick up a bottle and, in my usual state of klutz, managed to knock the first one into the rest….

I’ve never been in the middle of any explosion other than fireworks, but I thought for a split second that the stove had blown up! My neck was screeching pain at me and when I put my hand to my neck it came away bloody! I ran to the mirror to check and there was an half inch wide strip of skin gone from my larynx to just under the angle of my jaw…..

In the process of cleaning up I found a bloody cork on the far side of the kitchen and figured out what must have happened, that the one bottle that I managed to grab had fired its cork right at me! What did *I* do to the mead to make it want to cut my throat?

That was some awesome-tasting mead. I wish we’d gotten more of it….

Page created and published 8/9/25 (C)M. Bartlett
Last update 8/9/25