Re: Using raw, unfiltered honey to make meads?
Hey Wolf and Chef,
It's just a methodology that I use to keep the yeast happy and healthy. It's not a requirement for good mead because I've had good mead made in any number of different ways. I aerate twice a day, add nutrient in staggered doses, open ferment for the first 1/3 to 2/3 of fermentation, and sometimes more if it's a pyment or fruit melomel and there's a lot of fruit forming a cap.
It's really mostly about taking what you read and applying it to what fits your style and your approach. I like the methodology I use because it helps me turn out very consistant mead. I make traditional meads mostly now-a-days, and I've found that using a methodology helps keep the mead very consistant from batch to batch.
During the time that CO2 is being activly produced, it's fine to have just a sanitized cloth over the top of the mead. This keeps out airborne contaminants, and allows you free access to the mead in order to aerate/oxygenate, stirr, add nutrients and generally manipulate the mead in whatever way you choose. At a certain point during the fermentation, usually at the 1/3 sugar break is when I break out the airlocks and pop them on, but I still stir throughout the fermentation, not to aerate, but to keep the yeast moving. To me this is important for a couple of reasons:
Swirling helps to clear some pasteurized juices. This is because re-suspending the yeast (both living and dead) provides rudimentary fining. Those dead yeast cells will grab onto/attract stuff and drag it to the bottom. Along with the rudimentary fining, swirling also gets those living yeast back up into suspension so they can chow down on as much of the sugars as they can before they lyse and settle to the bottom.
Swirling also helps to break up any colonies of spoilage organisms that might gain a foothold in the lees at the bottom where they can otherwise be somewhat buffered from the toxic effects of the ETOH produced during fermentation. Spoilage yeast and organisms are not as alcohol tolerant as your selected yeast, and by keeping them from forming pockets of growth, and swirling them into suspension they become susceptible to the toxic effects of alcohol all the quicker.
This also exposes the spoilage yeasts to the Competitive Factors produced by the selected yeast strain you have chosen. The competitive factor of your yeast (if it produces it) is a mitochondrial protein that passes through the cell wall of the yeast and attaches to the cell wall of the unfriendly yeasts that are targeted as susceptible. This protein disrupts the magnesium metabolism which in turn causes the death of the cell. Obviously there is a lot more to it than this, but that's the basic idea.
Hope that helps,
Oskaar
