Hello again, homebrewing forum,
Executive Summary (TL;DR):
1. Without gravity measurements, how do I know when the time is right to bottle my mead?
2. Is aging in a corked bottle equivalent to aging in a secondary/tertiary, or are they completely different?
3. Are there any good books specifically about wine/mead making for beginners?
Background: I have followed
this recipe (more or less) and its cheaper, easier cousin to make 3 1-gallon batches of mead so far. Batch I and Batch II are about a month into their secondaries; Batch III is a few days from racking into its secondary.
(Other batches: 2 gallons of awful cider - so bad it gave me a headache before it got me drunk, but i muddled through; 1 gallon of better-planned cider that'll be at 2 weeks in primary in a few days, whereupon i'll let it sit a bit and mellow out for a couple months)
Fermentation conditions are not ideal: it's been getting 80-85*F in my apartment during the weekdays during the summer. I lucked into a heat tolerant yeast for Batch I (red star pasteur blanc), II just used some janky grocery store yeast, and I specifically chose a heat-tolerant yeast for Batch III (red star premiere cuvee). At some point I'll get a cooler deep enough to accommodate a 1gal carboy with an airlock on, then I'll work on controlling my temperatures better.
Because I keeps my clown shoes strapped on tight, I didn't take starting specific gravity measurements for any of my mead batches.
The Current Plan: Based on some half-assed reading of recipes and poking around, my current plan is for meads to be 1-3 weeks in primary, until bubbling becomes very slow. Then a quick taste while transferring to their secondaries to make sure they're not rotten garbage, and a minimum of 2 months in secondary. After that things get hazy:
Questions:
1. Given that I don't have specific gravity measurements, how do I know when I should bottle them? Recipes and sites seem to suggest that the longer you let them sit in the secondary (or tertiary, fourth-erary, etc.) the better. The recipe I used says start at six months and go. Some sources say a year+. Do I just keep tasting it, and when I figure it's pretty close it all goes in the bottles and gets put up for another six months?
1a. For that matter, would I know when to bottle if I had starting SG measurements?
2. I've read that corked bottles allow a very small amount of gas exchange to go on during bottle aging, sort of like the airlock on a slow late-stage fermentation. Are latter stages of fermentation at all interchangeable with bottle aging, or are they totally separate stages and concepts and ne'er the twain shall meet?
3. Can y'all recommend any books about beginner meadmaking (or, failing that, winemaking)? I've been needling my brother with questions, but he's mostly into brewing beer, and most of his books seem geared toward that as well.
Thanks very much for your time!