Hi everyone

My wife and I recently got our feet wet making some mead and bottled it last weekend.  Its only 3 months old and it already is quite delicious.  We made a gallon with apples and a gallon with pumpkin (pretty tasty!).

I was basing my approach of of the JAOM instructions I see around here, and just threw the fruit right into the mead.  We used the standard 1 gallon glass jugs that are ubiquitous in brewing it seems.  The flavor turned out great but it got a little messy and was a pain to get all of the pulp out when bottling time came.

We are looking to try some wine this time around.  I picked up more 1 gallon glass jugs and we are gonna have a marathon wine/mead making session this weekend.  I have one question though: Is it possible/recommended to use some sort of fermentation bag in these narrow mouthed gallon jugs?  I don't see anybody mention doing it that way, and looking at them it appears difficult to wrangle.  What is the best approach for including our fruit in these glass jugs?  Or am I just inventing a problem that doesn't exist and people use bags all the time in these jugs?

for fruit that you want to ferment on the skins, do that in a bucket of some sort first, then strain into the one gallon jugs.

at that point you can fill them appx 85% full and put fermentation locks on them.

once ferm is done, chill the containers. it is best to have more jugs laying around that you can sanitize and then cold rack into them.

With those, cold settle even longer, then rack off to bottle.

Sanitize with sodium peroxyhydrate, or sani star everything like a religion.

and speaking of fermenting bags:

fermentabag



Nice thing about the glass, is you can put them in a water bath to cool them down. Albeit that glass is a poor conductor of heat energy.

Just because the JAOM recipe is for one gallon, don't assume that one gallon brews (wine, beer, cider, Skeeter Pee, etc.) is all that common or ubiquitous.

Most are five gallon and some home brewers go up to 10-15-20 gallons.

One gallon, except for perhaps experimenting or for learning, is pretty much a waste of time.  The major downside to one gallon brews:  If it's a great brew, one gallon simply doesn't last, whether you are drinking it yourself or sharing with others.  You probably spent as much time on your batch of JAOM as I did, but I'll have about 6 gallons after all my work and time; whereas you'll have one gallon and when it's gone - and if it's as good as they say JAOM usually is - that won't take very long and there you are, having to start a whole 'nother batch just when you started liking the one you already made but is already gone.

But don't feel bad.  Before I started brewing, the first question I asked was:  what in the world am I going to do with five gallons?????  That was spring 2012.  Today, I have one JAOM, two Skeeter Pee, and two beers fermenting; all are +5 gallons (most are +6 gallons), that's +30 gallons at one time.  Some I'll drink, a lot will be given away to family and friends.  

Good luck.

You can get a one gallon fermentation bucket with a lid that has a hole for your airlock.