Mira

One practical warning: put the egg in gently and consider not using your best flask.

Dropping an egg into a narrow glass-lined flask is a good way to chip the liner, and a flask with a cracked liner loses its insulation permanently. Lower it in on a spoon, or use a steel-lined flask for this.

Also, the egg may crack from thermal shock if it goes straight from fridge to boiling water, which brings you back to warming it first.

The practical answers people actually use, given that trade:

Chill everything beforehand. The glass, the bottle, the mixers. A drink assembled from cold components needs almost no cooling in the glass.

Use large cubes or spheres. Less surface area per unit of mass means slower melting, so you get a longer period of cooling with less dilution over the time you actually drink it. This is why bars use big cubes for spirits.

Freeze the mixer. Cubes of tonic, juice or coffee dilute the drink with more of itself rather than with water. This is a genuinely good technique for iced coffee in particular.

Accept some dilution. For many spirits a little water is not a fault — it is why people add a few drops deliberately. The objection to ice is usually about too much dilution over time, not about any.

The things that genuinely cause a stall, worth checking against what you did:

Nutrients. This is the big one for mead. Honey lacks the nitrogen yeast needs, and without added nutrient the yeast struggles, ferments slowly and often stops early. Most mead guidance now recommends staggered nutrient additions during the first days.

Temperature. Too cold and the yeast goes dormant. Check where the vessel is sitting, particularly if it is on a cold floor.

Yeast health. Old yeast, or yeast pitched into liquid still too warm, gives a weak start.

Oxygen at the start. Yeast needs some at the beginning to build a population. Gently aerating the must before pitching helps considerably.

Your honey and water ratio is reasonable. If it has genuinely stalled, adding nutrient and gently rousing the sediment back into suspension restarts many stuck ferments.

Almost certainly impatient, and the sediment is good news rather than a puzzle.

Two weeks is short for a mead. Honey is low in the nutrients yeast need, so mead ferments considerably more slowly than a beer or a wine of similar strength — three to four weeks is normal for the main fermentation and longer is common.

The sediment is yeast that has done work and dropped out, which means fermentation happened. What you are tasting is a mead partway through: some sugar converted, plenty remaining, and not enough alcohol yet to be obvious against a lot of residual sweetness.

The other thing to know is that young mead tastes bad, or at best uninteresting, almost universally. It needs months of ageing to become pleasant. Judging a two week old mead by taste tells you very little.

On the dairy version: it is a real and separate product rather than a shortcut to the same thing.

The cream version is its own style — richer, sweeter, genuinely opaque from the milk fat, and shorter-lived because it now contains dairy and needs refrigerating.

So substituting milk into your syrup would not fix your problem, it would make a different drink. Worth doing deliberately if you want that one, and it will not get you the classic appearance.

There is also a middle case worth knowing: some clear infusions turn cloudy when chilled and clear again when warmed, because temperature affects solubility too. If yours goes slightly hazy in the freezer, that is a sign you have some oil in there and are close.