racking off
- Thread starter kipgunter
- Start date
-
Love Gotmead and want to see it grow? Then consider supporting the site and becoming a Patron! If you're logged in, click on your username to the right of the menu to see how as little as $30/year can get you access to the patron areas and the patron Facebook group and to support Gotmead!
-
We now have a Patron-exclusive Facebook group! Patrons my join at The Gotmead Patron Group. You MUST answer the questions, providing your Patron membership, when you request to join so I can verify your Patron membership. If the questions aren't answered, the request will be turned down.
It's to get it off the lees. If you left it, the dead yeast would break down, contributing flavors to your mead that may not be desirable.
To expand on that - depends on the style, and on how you did your primary. One major reason is to move from a vessel with lots of headspace to one with very little, both for obvious reasons. The second is again to get off the lees to avoid lees character from becoming overwhelming (though some people love it in certain styles and different kinds of yeast are better or in some cases much worse for lees aging). BUT in anything other than a traditional, those lees contain a lot more than just dead yeast, so getting off of lees that contain fruit matter for example is very important, because those can give you serious off characters as they break down.
Also, the simple act of racking does speed clearing, through small amounts of O2 being intoduced (binds with some things and they drop out), as well as how it mixes up the whole batch, which I presume also causes some binding and dropping to accellerate.
Also, the simple act of racking does speed clearing, through small amounts of O2 being intoduced (binds with some things and they drop out), as well as how it mixes up the whole batch, which I presume also causes some binding and dropping to accellerate.
