Rose petals from my mother's garden.

Mostly just the wilted ones. She grows those roses for her viewing pleasure and not to cook with, so she wouldn't appreciate it if I took the nice looking ones.

I saw a saffron & rose tea blend and I got the idea to make a saffron and rose mead.

I had two 16oz jars of Arashan honey (Sainfoin and 天山 Wildflower). This will be a half gallon batch, so I'll be using the full Sainfoin jar and half the 天山 Wildflower jar (the rest is for eating).

I started the batch last night. First I made a rose petal smoothie in the blender and then I poured it into the carboy with the honey and water and added wine yeast.

It seemed to take a while to get going. No bubbles were coming out of the airlock when I went to bed last night. Then, when I got up this morning it was bubbling so much the airlock was flooded with pink rosewater and dripping.

Luckily I had tied a t-shirt around my brew bottle (too keep out light) and it managed to absorb any drips, so I didn't have a big mess to clean up.

I took out the stopper, put the cap on, turned it upside down and gave the whole thing a thorough shake, then cleaned and re-inserted the stopper and airlock.

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They're both a nice rich amber hue, more orange tinted than some of my other batches because of the pigments from the (pink red and yellow) roses and the saffron respectively.

Note: the lighting is weird because I used flash while the room's bright overhead light was on.

Speaking of the Rhodomel, I went to grab it and the stopper had popped out sometime between today and last night without my realizing. I tasted it and it still tastes the same, so I didn't ruin it, thankfully. I think it was just a change in air pressure that forced the stopper out. The room I'm storing it in doesn't have good temperature control, and gets pretty hot in the afternoon. Anyway, I sprayed some argon gas into the bottle (look for wine-saver air cans if you're shopping for argon; it's heavier than oxygen so it creates a layer of inert gas on top of your brew that protects against oxidation) and sealed with a polyseal screw cap.

I'm racking at the end of the month. I'm going to add lavender and rosemary to the unflavored batch.

The rose flavor comes through VERY strongly, which is good. I was warned that the rose flavor might fade a lot if I put the petals in during the primary fermentation phase, but it seems I had nothing to worry about.

I mentioned a while ago that my plan was to do a rose & saffron mead, but instead of making a 1 gallon batch with both flavors, I'm making 2 half gallon batches with each flavor so that if one comes out much stronger than the other I can adjust the ratio later.

The second half gallon batch is as yet unflavored (I plan to put the saffron in once primary fermentation is done). I tasted it today. It has a bit of an odd lemony flavor. I don't mean that it's sour, but rather that it tastes a bit like lemon oil smells. It's also very pale in color compared to my other mead batches (of course, the honey I used was also much paler in color than most of the other honeys I've used).

I was expecting a more neutral flavor, since it came from a fairly neutral tasting honey.

LMAO we will under NO circumstances be doing, looking at, or even thinking about ANYTHING illegal.

...on our channel.

I quite like City Steading Brews. Their videos are better than other mead channels in terms of providing answers to specific questions. The titles are easily searchable, and they usually tell you everything they're going to do and why at the beginning of each video, so you don't usually have to watch the entire video to get the information you need.

I also appreciate that they're not constantly brewing Potion of Shit Yourself. Doin' the Most, for example, is always backsweetening with sweeteners like lactose and erithritol that are indigestible to yeast and, consequently, also indigestible to many, many humans.

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Progress update:

The new rose infused mead batch started to overflow again within a couple hours of re-inserting the airlock. I spent the day watching it with the bottle top open, giving it a good shake every 3 hours or so to release extra gas.

The petal puree floating at the top created a kind of a natural airlock, which was fascinating from a scientific standpoint. The gas from the fermentation was building up in the layer of floating petal mulch and pushing it up into the bottle opening, which was neat both to watch and to listen to.

Vaguely unsettling quiet squelching noises, like the breathing of a baby swamp monster.

By evening it had calmed down enough to re-insert the airlock.

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I may have gone overboard on the rose petals. The batch is very fragrant.