Over the last year~ I've started brewing mead at home, fun hobby and there's a lot of deep diving into the chemistry and techniques of it. My first couple of batches came out ok but without much complexity, since then I've started adding various extra ingredients (namely fruits) to the fermentation process and it's created some vastly better brews. Technically mead made with fruit is called Melomel, but Mead still sounds better =P On the right side is a basic mead with just water, honey, and yeast. On the left is a newer batch with raisins, black tea, and orange peel added. Used local texas wildflower honey for these. Bottling those batches up. I haven't tried carbonation yet but that's on my to do list for the latest brew I'm doing currently. This recipe is like the left one above, but I used florida orange blossom honey this time, and used a food processor to blend up the raisins and (more) orangepeel, along with a little more black tea (the tea seems to help feed the yeast with nutrients, but also darkens the mead and adds a crispness and depth to it). I also did a half gallon batch made with molasses instead of honey. I'm not too enthusiastic about this one, not a huge fan of molasses, but worst case scenario I can distill it into rum. Last image on the right there is from today, Racking (Transfering) the mead from the carboy fermentation jugs into wide mouth containers. Racking gets rid of a lot of the sediment, removes the add-ins like the fruit chunks, and allows the brew to sit and age. Typically fermentation is mostly or completely done at this point, you're just letting it age and clear. Once the mead has cleared a bit, I plan to rack it again, add some brown sugar to each, and then bottle. The brown sugar kicks up fermentation again and carbonates the mead inside the bottle.