yeah, accidentally dumped too much in there. i need to pre-measure my spices. I was just prepping it in a hurry
My whole life, I was a "pinch of this, dash of that, oh, about yay" guy. I started doing some things in bulk(mead, kraut, pickles, sausage) and I started coming across a couple of problems. One was the obvious: inconsistency from one batch to the next. The other was that, with something like mead for example, it might be more than a year before you actually evaluate it. And it's not so much the bad batches, it's the incredibly awesome ones. And I can't remember WTF I did that made this one batch so fucking perfect.
So, now I write things down, and when I evaluate, I keep little notes, like "more of this and less of that." I'm getting better and more consistent results that way. Though I have to admit that with pickles I just stuff a bunch of shit in there and hope for the best.
I would love to make my own mead, but I don't have AC in my place so I have no temperature control for when it gets 80+ degrees outside. I can't even do my normal fermenting during the summer, which is annoying.
Dude, I see the coriander, but that is a shitload of allspice for one jar of pickles on the right.