Having read that degassing helps to facilitate clearing, I've been toying around with degassing my mead, metheglin, and loganberry melomel. However, I have heard many people state that there can be no end to the c02, no matter how much degassing is done. 5-10 minutes solid, repeated 2,3,4 times ... And some say their wines still taste gassy after degassing. It seems like quite a bit of extra work/cleaning/transferring, especially if the results are negligible. So I'm wondering if there might be any sort of consensus on this. Does anyone find that they notice a significant difference after degassing?
Personally, I like the very slight gassiness I sense in my meads at a few months of age. But we're selling them at the local farmer's market, so I'm contending here with the tastes of the general public. I'm leaning towards just waiting it out in bulk storage, since wines need that time to develop anyway. But the degassing component, supposedly, can take upwards of a year. While the maturation and development of complexity can too, that can happen in a bottle, whereas the degassing cannot. Does anyone find that their meads consistently clear and/or degas sufficiently, say, in 2-3 months? Or is the year plus ... thing pretty common?
Personally, I like the very slight gassiness I sense in my meads at a few months of age. But we're selling them at the local farmer's market, so I'm contending here with the tastes of the general public. I'm leaning towards just waiting it out in bulk storage, since wines need that time to develop anyway. But the degassing component, supposedly, can take upwards of a year. While the maturation and development of complexity can too, that can happen in a bottle, whereas the degassing cannot. Does anyone find that their meads consistently clear and/or degas sufficiently, say, in 2-3 months? Or is the year plus ... thing pretty common?