Melomel clearing

I've got a blackberry melomel that I started back in February, it's been in the secondary now since May... I was hoping by now it would have cleared out much better, but you can see there's still quite a haze hovering around the bottom 1/4 of the carboy...

I added the appropriate amount of pectic enzyme before fermentation, so I think this is still just the residual solids that got sucked up from the primary at racking...

Any tips for clarifying? Being that it's been sitting in secondary for 3 months, I doubt another racking is going to do much, unless I just rack off everything except that bottom portion, which leaves me with only about 3/4 of a gallon, and I don't want to lose that much mead.

Would cold crashing do me any good? (Still don't fully understand that process, haven't done it yet with anything) or should I just look at using something like Super-Kleer to try to solidify this hazy mass?

It does look like a lot of pectin down there, and not traditional lees.

You could definitely try sticking it in the fridge to see if it causes the lees to compact down so you can rack off of it.

Putting it in the fridge should help. If it still looks like a huge loss you could rack the clear part as normal. Then put the bottom stuff in a smaller carboy in the fridge until it settles again. Each time you rack put the bottom sludge in a smaller and smaller container. I currently have a wine bottle in my fridge that is 1/3 lees from doing just this.

I was under the impression that if it was pectin, it would be more evenly distributed through the wine... but maybe I'm confusing myself after reading hundreds of different posts and articles. Do you think more pectic enzyme might help at this point?

HeruRaHa said:

I was under the impression that if it was pectin, it would be more evenly distributed through the wine... but maybe I'm confusing myself after reading hundreds of different posts and articles. Do you think more pectic enzyme might help at this point?

Click to expand...

No- it actually looks pretty clear from what I can tell in the photo.

So what did you end up doing with your mead and how did it turn out ? I've got two raspberry melomels that have the same 3 inch cloud at the bottom. I'll be racking in the next week or two so I'm curious as to your progress.

It looks separated to me. I would rack the top stuff and if you really think there is something useful in the "cloud" maybe suck some of that up as well. I like the idea of racking the clear stuff off and cold-crashing the remaining bit to see if you can get anything else useful out of it. But you may just have to settle with having 4/5 of a gallon.

I haven't done anything yet. I've been considering trying some fining agents, perhaps starting with some bentonite and seeing if that does any good, but I've been too busy with other projects to tackle it just yet. I'm preparing myself for the possibility that chelleomi raises, that I may simply have to settle for 4/5 of a gallon on this batch... if it's as good as the thieved samples indicate, I'll just do a 6 gallon batch next time and the loss hopefully won't be as big of a percentage of my yield.

Prepare yourself for the loss, but there no harm in trying the shrinking vessels technique to try and save a bit more...

cold crashing might help, but this is why I gave up 1 gallon batches.