I just started my first couple of little 1 gallon batches of mead this past weekend (my brother bought me a small homebrewing kit four years ago so naturally I rolled out of bed at about 4:45 PM on Saturday, June 10th 2017 and said "I'm going to go to the store and buy six pounds of honey.")

I'm clear on how the apparatus is set up for the first two ferments - I've got it airlocked in the one carboy for 2-3 weeks more or less until the bubbles slow down to a significant degree, then I'm supposed to carefully rack it into a secondary (also airlocked) for a couple of months.

On the third and later stages, I'm not sure -- the recipes I looked at say there'll be virtually no actual fermentation going on by the time it gets to the tertiary stage, so do the 3rd and later stages need to be airlocked? Or are they basically just being aged at that point and I might as well put it in glass bottles and put it somewhere dark to get good and old. One recipe suggested racking into a new fermenter every couple of months as stuff precipitates out.

Obviously I'm not expecting my first two gallons of grocery-store-honey-wine to be the kind of stuff you keep in the cellar in case a Person of Quality comes around, but I'm just trying to nail down the basics.

Any guidance y'all can offer would be much appreciated.

Pics of the apartment kitchen brewery. I am well aware that my "setup" is "clown shoes".

Two batches of mead (airlocked carboy, blowoff tube'd gallon water jug, wrapped in grocery store bags from an earlier try at possible-catastrophic-leak protection) and one batch of cider (blowoff tube carboy) sitting in a cooler (No. 2 Mk. I* of the Catastrophic Leak Protection):


With Hefty-brand light-blocker installed:

I use an airlock until I bottle, even after degassing wine.

Awesome, thanks very much!