Copy Link
Add to Bookmark
Report
Mead Lovers Digest #0228
Mead Lover's Digest #228 18 October 1993
Forum for Discussion of Mead Making and Consuming
Dick Dunn, Digest Coordinator
Contents:
Mead Lover's Digest is MOVING! (John Dilley)
a note from the new digest coordinator (Dick Dunn)
Randy's First, RE: Commercial Mead ("Randy Ward")
Send ONLY articles for the digest to mead-lovers@eklektix.com. Send
subscribe/unsubscribe/admin requests to mead-lovers-request@eklektix.com.
There is an FTP archive of the digest on sierra.stanford.edu in pub/mead.
------------------------------
Subject: Mead Lover's Digest is MOVING!
From: John Dilley <jad@porter.nsa.hp.com>
Date: Fri, 15 Oct 93 09:50:11 -0700
This note is to announce the movement of the Mead Lover's Digest
from nsa.hp.com to eklektix.com. I am turning over the running of this
list to Dick Dunn, one of the top five frequent contributors to this
digest and experienced mead maker.
In the future, please address all administrative requests to
mead-lovers-request@eklektix.com -- not to anything@nsa.hp.com. For the
next few days the NSA addresses will forward to eklektix, but after that
you should make sure you are using the right address.
It's been fun creating and watching this digest grow. Wassail!
-- jad --
John Dilley <jad@nsa.hp.com>
PS.
The top 10 contributors, by number of messages posted to this
digest, are:
10 jad (John Dilley)
10 john (John Gorman)
12 Larry_Lynch-Freshner
12 betel (Robert Crawford)
14 SLK6P (John Wyllie)
15 roy.rudebusch
17 cav (Rick Cavasin)
18 rcd (Dick Dunn)
19 jane (Jane Beckman)
23 Daniel.F.McConnell
------------------------------
Subject: a note from the new digest coordinator
From: rcd@raven.eklektix.com (Dick Dunn)
Date: 16 Oct 93 21:20:45 MDT (Sat)
As John Dilley has just explained, I'm taking over as coordinator of the
Mead Lover's Digest, effective with this issue.
The new addresses are:
mead-lovers@eklektix.com (article submissions ONLY please!)
mead-lovers-request@eklektix.com (subscribe/unsubscribe, other
administrivia)
The -request address is read by a human (me) rather than a program, so
you need not worry about stylistic/syntactic precision. Just make it clear
enough that I can figure it out when it's late in the evening and I've had
a couple glasses of mead!
First, I'll thank John on behalf of all of us, for getting the digest
running, and keeping it running so smoothly for so long. He's done an
important service in helping mead-makers find each other and communicate
about what they're doing. I'll also thank John personally for having
all the details of list maintenance in order so that taking it over has
been straightforward.
Next, let me bore you a bit with who I am and what my thoughts are about
this mailing list. Just this once, I'll ramble for a while, but in the
future I'll do my best to keep administrivia to the minimum needed.
To forestall obvious questions about the new address: "eklektix" is my
business name, merely a twist on "eclectics" replacing 'c' with 'k' (since
the etymology *is* Greek, after all) and changing the ending to "-ix" as is
tritely traditional for businesses which have anything to do with Unix.
(I.e., no, I don't make mead for a living...and it's a sole proprietorship,
so no, I'm not hiring!;-)
Yes, I know it's hard to type! Sorry.
I came to mead-making via homebrewing, as I suspect a lot of us did. I
made my first mead about eleven years ago. Since that time, I've slowly
shifted the balance of my brewing away from beer and toward mead, to the
extent that I haven't made any beer at all in several years. I've got five
meads blorping away in carboys "even as I write".
I feel that home mead-making today is in about the same state as home-
brewing was ten years ago or more. In some ways we're better off--we've
benefited from the growth of homebrewing and a growing general under-
standing of good beer and wine. In some ways we're worse off--there are
few commercial meads (even fewer good ones), and very little for us to
compare to...exacerbated by the fact that you can add almost anything to a
mead--the territory is not only uncharted, but vast. We've still got some
very basic concerns (for example, "to boil or not to boil?") that are not
only unanswered (we can expect them to be topics of discussion forever, of
course), but not even particularly well explored. I'm interested in doing
what I can to help mead-makers communicate and exchange ideas; that's why
I jumped at the chance when John said he wanted to hand off the digest.
So...that's where I'm coming from. Now, about the digest itself, and my
role in handling it...I think John's approach was pretty much the correct
one: hands-off, keep it flowing. I like the term "coordinator"; I don't
want to "moderate" in any editorial sense and I don't see any reason to
think editorial control is necessary. If you have opinions or suggestions
on this matter, please send them to me either at the -request address or
personally (rcd@eklektix.com).
I *am* going to impose some mechanical controls on submissions, primarily
to address two concerns:
* Keep (ab)errant mailers from blowing failure messages back into the
digest.
* Prevent people who don't know the "-request" address convention from
sending (un)subscribe requests to the digest.
Essentially, if a message comes to the submission address (mead-lovers),
and the filters find things that suggest the message is not really in-
tended to be a submission, it will get tossed over to the administrative
address (mead-lovers-request) where I can check it by hand. I don't think
this should cause any problems, except for slight delays if you submit
something and your surname happens to be "Root" or "Daemon". I'm wrestling
with the question of whether I should catch "Mead Lovers Digest..." in the
Subject line of a submission--that might be a good indicator of failed mail
being bounced back to the wrong address, or it might be a real reply to an
article, in which the submitter hasn't put in the Subject line for the
particular article. You folks can help ease this concern by editing the
Subject line so it makes sense when you respond to a digest article.
I *may* try to catch longish lines (> 80 characters) and return the
article for editing. The purpose is to make text readable on as many
displays as is practical. (Anyway, there's a human factor: lines of text
longer than 80 characters are hard to read even if your display windows
accommodate them.) But that's undecided. I *will* catch very long lines
and return the article. The problem is that there is a high chance that
such articles will not only be difficult to read, but will be arbitrarily
truncated as they pass through various mail programs.
I will try to catch things that appear to be uuencoded, ascii-hex'ed, or
otherwise rendered into a form that's not directly human readable. The
purpose is to catch messages that have encountered a mailer "with an
attitude" which decided to convert them. (I won't reject relevant image
data, etc., that comes in some encoded form. It will just have to go
through a manual step to verify that people can make sense of it.)
It would be nice if folks would follow usual netiquette (trim quoted text
to only as much as is required to establish context, keep .signatures to 4
or fewer lines, etc.) but I'm not going to try to exercise any control
over that fine a level of mechanical detail.
As I said, I don't intend to exercise editorial control; I'll let the
digest run semi-automatically as soon as all the switch-over kinks are
worked out of it. People ought to be able to figure out what's appro-
priate without outside control. (I'll probably change my views on that
the first time a get-rich pyramid scheme article slips by!;-)
I'm working on updating the FAQ list, which is sent to each new subscriber.
I'll probably post a current copy of that at the beginning of next month,
both for comments on the revisions and to be sure everyone has seen it.
After that, I may put out a *brief* bi-monthly informational posting, but I
won't repeat the FAQ.
Concerns? Comments? Desiderata? Send me a note. I'd be glad to get some
feedback right at the start here, for guidance if nothing else.
---
Dick Dunn rcd@eklektix.com -or- raven!rcd Boulder, Colorado USA
...Simpler is better.
------------------------------
Subject: Randy's First, RE: Commercial Mead
From: "Randy Ward" <RJW9@PSUVM.PSU.EDU>
Date: Sat, 16 Oct 93 11:33 EDT
Hi all, yes I am new here, and I have been reading through some of the
back issues of the Digest. They make for some good reading. But, I put
together my first batch of mead the other day. :)
17 lbs Orange blossom honey
4 tsp Acid blend
5 tsp Yeast nutrient
Water to approx. 5.5 gal (a little extra to top-off with)
Heated honey with 1.5 gal water, skimmed scum, to pasteurize,(Did not
boil). After 15 min. added to primary which contained 3 gal cold oxygenated
water along with acid and nutrient. Added water to make total volume
and waited one day for it to cool. I don't have a wort chiller. :( Added
yeast the next day, 24 hours latter it is talking nicely. :)
I am a new resident of the state of Pennsylvania, so while seeking out the
local homebrew store to get some more acid blend for above I noticed in the
owners bottle collection a Mead bottle lable. Unfortunately he had been
given the bottle and had not had the pleasure of drinking it. But on the
bottle was the name of the winery that had brewed and bottled it.
Bargetto Winery
Soquel, CA
Unfortunately, this is all that was there. Maybe someone in CA could comment
about this possible source?
**********************************************************************
* Randy J. Ward * (215) 320-4834 * I hear and I forget *
* Penn State Univ.-Berks * FAX (215)320-4857 * I see and I remember *
* Dept. of Chemistry * Bitnet: RJW9@PSUVM * I do and I understand*
* P.O. Box 7009 * Internet: * *
* Reading, PA 19610 * RJW9@psuvm.psu.edu * Chinese Proverb *
**********************************************************************
------------------------------
End of Mead Lover's Digest #228
