Chinese Brewing - Balloons, Tubes, and Explosions

A few months ago while in Saint Paul I began to brew my first two bottles of mead (honey wine) with a friend of mine. We used honey, lemon, wine yeast, tea, and water to create a tasty concoction mostly only known by Renaissance fair attendees and brewers.

The other day when I was in Jusco, a Japaneese based grocery store, I came across a honey stand which featured 9 taps of honey. Inspiration seized me and I began to seek out the other ingredients and supplies -- tea being the most accessible. This took a few days and a great deal of help from my Chinese friends and other T.A.s.


I began a brew today in a glass bottle with a balloon on top. I am going on vacation in a few days to GuiZhou and Tibet so I was excited to get the brew going -- Hopefully being able to return to find a surprise. My excitement got the best of me. I checked on the bottle a few hours later and found the balloon inflated and hardly any activity in the bottle. At this rate the balloon would burst before vacation and the whole batch would be ruined...or worse, I would leave and return from vacation to find yeast sprayed all over, the balloon popped, and the wine completely wasted.

So it was time to go back to the drawing board and go shopping again. We went back to Jusco to find a large plastic tube and prepare for a big BBQ party we are throwing at our house tomorrow. Without much luck finding a tube, we spent 2 hours of shopping for groceries and gave up on the tube. With our hands full of bags we returned to the bus stop to return home. On the way we crossed a faucet shop with 10 different sized tubes, one of which was perfect for the job. Anyways this story is dragging on a bit and I am not sure how interesting you will find it but I have everything set up so that my worries have been relieved and excitement is growing. I will take pictures and post them later. The batch is very small, but I am excited to share it with my friends who have ever so willingly helped me get the supplies and drag them around the city. I hope this works!