First Mead - Melomel - amazing!

Here is a picture of my first mead, way too young with only two and a half months since it was 14 lbs of honey and 10 lbs of peaches... but still showing most excellent clearing and the taste is simply fantastic.

In primary I used the honey blended with 6 lbs of the peaches which were sliced and then put in a blender one pound at a time with boiling water to kill any nasties. My OG was 1.128, crazy big... i pitched the wyeast sweet mead with some yeast nutrient and waited.

Fermentation stuck at 1.086, so I then pitched two packets of Red Star Pasteur and did a daily shaking. After one month, racked to secondary on top of four pounds of peach slurry prepared as before.

I know this is kind of brute force fermenting, and I certainly will learn more finesse in the future.

I do not know how it fermented out so low, but I ended up at 0.980 which puts it close to 20% ABV I think.

I know from my wine tasting class that fruit fools the tongue into thinking "sweet" and the taste of this proves that out. The color is bright straw, and it has only been bottled for two weeks and yet is clearing really nicely. The flavor is of sweet peaches with a touch of floral fragrance. Really, really nice; I cannot wait for this to age and become something really special in a year or so.

I am hooked!

How much honey taste.

I have a three month old peach that looks almost impossible to clear. How did you get yours so clear?

Not sure, just used typical brewing techniques of cold crashing, racking from the top down, and then a five gallon paint strainer lining the bottling bucket when it came time to fill. Primary with peaches, secondary with peaches, then a tertiary rack where it really started to clear. There is still some stuff settling at the bottom of each bottle, but if poured carefully then yes, very clear. What did you use for the peaches? Mine were only put into the blender to a coarse slurry, much like creamy oatmeal, and thus the relatively larger bits settled or were filtered out.

TheWeeb said:

Not sure, just used typical brewing techniques of cold crashing, racking from the top down, and then a five gallon paint strainer lining the bottling bucket when it came time to fill. Primary with peaches, secondary with peaches, then a tertiary rack where it really started to clear. There is still some stuff settling at the bottom of each bottle, but if poured carefully then yes, very clear. What did you use for the peaches? Mine were only put into the blender to a coarse slurry, much like creamy oatmeal, and thus the relatively larger bits settled or were filtered out.

Click to expand...

If your peaches were treated in a similar way to fresh grapes, then you can just take the pits/stones out, then freeze/thaw them to help break down the fruit cell walls. That way, as the fruit flesh is fermented, the larger amount of it stays connected to the skins and is easily removed.

A lot of people like to over process (IMO that is) their fruit. Yet it just seems to make it harder to remove any slurry/sediment.

But if it works for you, then great........

I gently re-bottled the remainder of this batch by carefully decanting into a one gallon carboys and then rinsing out the bottom stuff from the existing flasks and re-bottling. It is so clear now; going to cellar the remainder of the batch for a while. The color is simply gorgeous. The taste is still pretty hot, but time will mellow it out.

That is *really* clear!!! Looks great!

Ed