Christmas Greetings from a Limey Export!

[UKTony]

Again, thanks for taking the time to respond guys, I have lots of info that's all brand new to me, I'm just trying to connect the dots.

For my next trick I'll be searching the forums for ways to guarantee that my first batch doesn't CO2 explode and paint the spare room, thereby leaving me no option other than a month of sleep on the sofa, and weeks of stink-eye from the long suffering spouse!

I promise the dumb questions will come less frequently, at least I hope they will!

Cheers

Tony

 

[Chevette Girl]

I've had Moniack a bunch of times mostly back in my pagan days but I actually haven't tasted it since I started making my own meads. I do remember it being sweet but not sickeningly so. I have a bottle in the closet given to me as a wedding present, but I think I'll save it a few more years, maybe by our 5th anniversary I will have drunk all the special bottles we brought back from our honeymoon.

Don't be turned off all wildflower honeys forever, they will differ depending on the time of year they were harvested, the hive location and the growing season that year, every year can be different and some of them are just fantastic (of course, the only honeys I've tased are golden (mostly goldenrod), clover, buckwheat, and a goldenrod-aster honey that's too expensive to make mead with but boy is it fantastic, and wildflower, the current batch I've got is almost as good as the goldenrod-aster...

I was also curious to see how it would change your perception of the tupelo honey if you cut it with some water, you might be able to taste the underlying flavour if the sweetness was knocked down a little.

And don't worry about it just yet, but you may at some point want to combine different honeys to balance their qualities, you may find backsweetening with some tupelo adds more sweetness to a mead that turned out more sour or bitter or tannic than you'd like... both of my big traditional batches were predominantly golden honey with a small amount of the very strong buckwheat honey for some complexity, and I recently tasted some that's been aging since 2006 or so and it tastes about like what I remember Moniack tasting like.

 

[Chevette Girl]

Well, let us know if you don't come up with answers, but here's a hint, look at stabilization.

 

[UKTony]

So am about to finally get around to making this mead of mine.... however I have some (more) business trips coming up, which has been the main difficulty for getting this started, which means I need to try and plan this very carefully. So I'm hoping that if I detail what I hope to make, people can give me guidance as to timings on the process. I know that it can't "calculated" exactly per se, but I'm hoping it can approximated. For example, if it needs to ferment for about 3 to 5 days I can plan it for a down week.

As I understand it, there are three main stages I need to worry about.

1. Mixing + Fermentation
2. Racking
3. Bottling.

Also if I recall correctly, the transition from 1 to 2 is the most time sensitive, and a mead can stay racked until a person is ready bottle (in my case quite some time for a traditional mead?). The problem is my business trips can often range from a day or two, to a week or more. The last thing I want to do is start a 3 day process if I'm about to disappear for a week.

So here is the recipe I plan to use.

Mead Type: Traditional
HoneyVariety: Summer Thistle
Target ABV: ~14.6
6 (US) Gallons
~ 3lb 1oz per Gallon (for target ABV) = 18lb 7oz Honey
Yeast: 71-B 1122

On a separate note, is it possible to over aerate?? Maybe this is a dumb question?

Thanks for any help in advance.

Cheers

Tony.

 

[kuri]

Regarding aeration, yes it is possible to aerate too much, but it's only really a potential problem if you use pure oxygen. Yeast love oxygen up to a point, but too much is harmful and will stress them. With any method of aerating with normal air the highest level you are likely to get to is 8ppm, which is perfectly safe. With pure oxygen you can hit 26ppm, which can be harmful. According to the Wyeast Laboratories page on the subject (http://www.wyeastlab.com/hb_oxygenation.cfm), over-oxygenation isn't really a problem in practice since the yeast go through the oxygen in 3 to 9 hours. With mead making people aerate more often, however, and I suspect that if you aerated with pure oxygen 3 times a day for 5 minutes at a time you'd be stressing your yeast out quite a bit.

For low to mid-strength beers (up to 8% ABV) I've found that 30 seconds of oxygen given once in the beginning is sufficient. I've gone as high as 1 minute and found no real added benefit but also no negative results. For higher strength beers (up to 12% ABV) I've given 30 seconds of oxygen once a day for the first 3 days with good results. I haven't tried giving more than that, though it would probably be a good idea since higher gravity worts dissolve less oxygen than lower gravity worts. I would guess that this holds true for meads as well, meaning that longer oxygenation times would probably be in order. (I've read somewhere on this site a recommendation of oxygenating for 2 minutes at a time once a day for 3 days using pure oxygen. I'm betting that the yeast were perfectly happy at that level.)

Regarding other mead specific questions I'll defer to people with real mead making experience, though my gut feeling is that the time you mostly have to worry about is during the first 3 days when you want to be adding nutrients and oxygen. Most yeasts are fine with your leaving them in primary for an extra week beyond what's needed, and some are even fine with an extra month. I don't know if 71-B is one of these yeasts, though.

 

[Medsen Fey]

For wine fermentation, the yeast need only about 10 ppm O2 to generate the sterols to achieve completion. Mead ferments are probably the same. Above that, the additional O2 is of little to no benefit, and could potentially become harmful to the mead at some point.

Very high gravity fermentations might need more.

Sent from my DROID RAZR using Tapatalk 2

 

[UKTony]

Thanks Medsen,

Can you throw any light on the approximate durations and timeframes of the main stages of the process?

Regards

Tony