| Author |
Message |
    
onebarrel (66.48.1.67)
| | Posted on Thursday, February 12, 2004 - 09:25 pm: | 
|
Hope someone can help me out.
Recently finished 2 batches of mead - one dry and one sweet.
The dry one fermented from 1.110 to 1.006 without incident -
clear as a bell and ready to bottle after aging for 3 months.
The sweet one fermented from 1.100 to 1.056 and is still cloudy -
have tried restarting with EC1118 yeast but I think the ph level is
inhibiting any yeast activity - very slow...
I am pretty hot to get both of these in the bottle because I am leaving
country for a while and need to take care of this stuff.
Heres me thoughts - I transfer both at the same time into my kegging
system and lightly filter (#1 pad) to remove haze and most yeast after
first making sure fermentation stops (by treating must) then directly
proceed to bottle as usual.
Heres my question - with the differentials in TGs what would my
expected blended Fg be ?
Also is there any danger in stripping a lot of flavor out of it by
filtering with paper plates ? the sweet is pretty sweet and should
balance out the dryness from the first batch.
Any help would be appreciated. |
Wykowski (209.222.26.27)
| | Posted on Thursday, February 12, 2004 - 09:50 pm: |
|
I'm not very experienced with mead, but you might want to consider...
Ive' heard filtering may cause oxidation, something you might not want in an aged product
beware that the sweet one's ferment may take-off again after racking...be careful of bottle bombs |
Bill Aimonetti (143.183.121.1)
| | Posted on Thursday, February 12, 2004 - 10:06 pm: |
|
If the pH is too low for the sweet one, you could gently stir in come calcium carbonate to raise it and the yeast should take off again.
Assuming that both batches are the same volume you should get a 1.031 if you blend them. I would not filter but let time do your filtering for you. The blend could take off again as stated above so you should use some type of fermentation inhibiter for wine of you go that route. Most meads I make don't get bottled for atleast two years so I know you can leave them in the fermenters while your gone with no worry. |
Bill Pierce (24.141.129.137)
| | Posted on Friday, February 13, 2004 - 02:21 pm: |
|
It's probably not a pH issue unless this is a fruit mead. You have a classic stuck fermentation. What was the O.G. and the primary yeast strain? It takes *a lot* of yeast to restart a stuck fermentation, not merely a couple of packets of rehydrated dry yeast.
I would not blend and bottle the two meads; fermentation could take off again spontaneously, with disastrous consequences. My own instincts would be to leave the sweet mead alone until you return. Then blend it with a fresh batch of unfermented must into which you have pitched a healthy population of yeast. This is more likely to ferment out the sugars. |
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