what to do with my mead

[cul8rv8]

So I'm looking for ideas. I have a mead in one of my carboys, it's been in there forever. I kinda just put it in the back of the closet I ferment in and have forgotten about it. It's been there for quite literally about a year to a year and a half. My cousin always brings it up, but I tell him I have no wine bottles or corks/corker to put it in, and that's that. Well now he wants to break it out in a week when some friends come to town from Ohio. I have no faith in it even tasting that good, as it was his idea to make it, but he never wanted to take care of buying the things needed to bottle. So anyways, here are the options...

1) the tedious bottling into beer bottles and capping them.
2) putting it in multiple growlers that I have from my collection.
3) kegging it.

As I said, as horrible as this sounds, I really could care less about this mead. I know it didn't ferment out as far as I wanted it, and I just let it sit. I'm sure my carboy is going to be a PITA to clean, but again, it was his carboy, not mine. lol As far as I'm concerned, I'll just keg it, put it on the co2 and drink it from there, and as it sits let it carbonate. If I had my way, I would come up with some wine bottles and cork it and let it age in bottles for longer, but apparently since my cousin bought the ingredients, he says he's tired of waiting.

So anyways, if anyone has any suggestions, I don't really care how off the wall they are, I'm all ears. The cheapest I could find 24 wine bottles to have delivered was around $70 or so, and I figure I could go buy super cheap bottles of wine and just pour it out and pay less than that. Don't they have bottles of wine for $2 at Trader Joes? So that would be about $50, much better than the costs of getting bottles shipped in. Wow, do I wish there was a LHBS in Vegas.

[Cosmic Charlie]

If you can get some American sparkling wine bottles, like Korbel, you can cap them with your capper. I always bottle my mead still in beer bottles (but a few in Korbel bottles).

[markaberrant]

I just use beer bottles.

[Mill Rat]

Beer bottles, still. But I also put some in larger cappable champagne bottles, too.

[zoom6zoom]

You may not have a LHBS, but I'll bet some of the places there serve a lot of champagne... you can probably get free bottles pretty easily. Then all you need is the plastic corks and wire keepers.

Personally, if they're coming over to your place, I'd just keg it!

[beerking]

Most of my meads are brewed very strong. That is the way I like them. Therefore, I always bottle a portion of my batch in the old Thomas Hardy "nip" bottles. (~6 oz, IIRC). That way I can have a small nightcap when I want.

[cul8rv8]

Well, we will sort-of be at my place, we will be hanging out in the garage at my cousins, which is directly across the street. So it's very easy to walk over to my kegerator in my garage. :) Between my cider needing racked this week and kegging the pale ale, I may just put the mead in the keg and be done with it. I know we won't drink it all, but I can easily just throw around 10 psi on it then remove it from the gas to dispense it and keep it still. I'm not sure how easy it would be to get champagne bottles, as there are casinos everywhere, and I know they serve plenty, but they are pretty tight on stuff leaving. I wouldn't even know where to begin to ask about getting the empty bottles, there's so many levels of people it would have to go through. I could just throw it in a keg, then bottle some of it for storage with my beer gun then dispense from the keg for all of us when we're hanging out.

Thanks for the ideas, guys. I was a little flustered the other day, and I made the post in haste a bit, as I do care about the mead, I'm sure it's going to be killer. I'm sure it will give killer headaches the next day, too. lol I know from when I racked it to the carboy way back when that it was well over 5 gallons, so my cousin and I just drank what didn't fit that night and we both woke up with killer headaches. But maybe the year it's been sitting it will be better on the hangover side.