After nearly three months of waiting, I got my first taste of the mead yesterday, taken as a cheeky glass during bottling.
The bottling process itself is fairly simple - clean out some old bottles, take out the bung and syphon in the mead. Syphoning is easy if you have a tap, although it took me by surprise how quickly the syphoning started, which made a bit of a mess!
As for bottles, I used wine and rum bottles here (75cl), although I've previously used 500ml beer bottles, which I feel have a nicer look to them, and you get the joys of fitting crown corks, followed by the even greater joy of removing them, just like on real alcohols!
To make two of the bottles extra special, I chucked some small bits of oak in, to give an "oak-aged" flavour. Whether this will work or not I'm yet to find out... As a note to budding brewers, the wood I had was slightly too big for the bottle, so I hammered it in. This is very dangerous, and shouldn't be attempted unless you know what you are doing, or have a suitable lack of self preservation. It is left as an exercise for the reader to decide which category I fall into - points to anyone who gets it right!
So - the taste test. I won't go into details, as the brew hasn't had its official unveiling yet, but I'd go so far as to say it'd my best yet, with the possible exception of "Vince and Bryony's Wedding Berry Mead".
