Lotus honey mead

A long time ago, I bought a fair bit of lotus-blossom honey with the intent that it would make good mead. In case you've never tried lotus-blossom honey, it has a sort of tingly feeling like peppermint on the back of your tongue and a nice floral flavor.

Back in August, the girl and I finally turned it into must to make mead from it. Today, we racked it.

I think my greater experience with wine-tasting is going to be very good for my meadmaking ability. I've tasted mead very much like that and thought "ugh, that's awful." Whereas today I tasted it and thought, "that's young, harsh, and definitely not done fermenting. But there's a really good mead hiding in there if I can avoid spoiling it."

After the initial slightly bitter, unpleasantly zesty taste of yeast still doing its thing, the aftertaste is very much like the honey itself, but slightly alcoholic. I like mead because I like the taste of honey. There's a mead hiding in there that's very true to the taste of that honey.

Now I just have to not do anything too wrong and mess it up :-)

The other mead that we started at the same time is good too. I just don't have anything especially interesting to say about it :-)

Positive Reinforcement

After I stopped working on my MUD library, and after I stopped working at PeakStream, I pretty much stopped having anybody except coworkers use the code I wrote. My current stuff at ACCESS may eventually have real users, but not right now. It's part of why I kept working on the MUD library so long -- somebody was actually getting use out of what I did.

Today, I got this message about RailsGame, one of my projects:

Thanks Noah. Your project looks almost improbably relevant :) Time to
sit down and read some of your code - many thanks.

I hadn't realized just how good a feeling it would be when somebody looked likely to actually get some use out of my Rails stuff.

[Edit: and the guy submitted a minor patch on something I was doing slightly wrong. Awesome!]