Think I made mistakes...

I made a double batch Cherry Melomel in a 3 gallon carboy.

Ingredients: 2lbs cherries, 2 cups orange juice with pulp, 2 packets Montreche yeast, 2 gallons Spring water, 6lbs of clover honey.

It took one full day before I had activity in the airlock. Now, 5 days later, I'm not getting a lot of activity. I'm getting one bubble every 11.2 seconds. I keep thinking that I should be getting the same yeast activity I did in my raspberry mix where I used Fleishmans Bread Yeast. Had to pour that sucker off 3 times.

1. Should I add more yeast before I rack for the first time?
2. Can I rack it onto more cherries or even a vanilla bean?
3. Is it too late to place the carboy on a wedge to move to sediment to one corner?

1. No. Check the gravity. Montrachet is a low activity yeast. When fermenting apfelwein with it, I only get a tiny ring of bubbles at the top of the carboy and that's it.

2. Yes.

3. No.

what ace said.
Never use airlock activity to judge fermentation, use a hydrometer. Also there was no reason to use 2 packets of yeast. 1 packet is good for a 6 gallon batch. Ive even stretched 1 packet into 2 different primaries ~6gallons each, by splitting a very healthy starter.
Some recommendations;
1. check the gravity with a hydrometer, according to gotmead's mead calculator your OG should be around 1.076 with a potential of 10.24 ABV, which is very do-able with Montrachet.
2 Stir the must, gently at first, in your sink in case it erupts like the old mentos and coke viral videos. This will aerate the must, which I believe oxygen helps the yeast multiply? and also gets everything mixed together. You should do this once a day for the first couple of days.

Will have to wait till tomorrow to find something to pull a bit of the must up with, since it's all in a carboy. But I did pull the bung and stir it for a bit. It's now bubbling again. 1 every 18.1 secs.

clcarlton said:

Will have to wait till tomorrow to find something to pull a bit of the must up with, since it's all in a carboy. But I did pull the bung and stir it for a bit. It's now bubbling again. 1 every 18.1 secs.

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Sanitise a turkey baster, that usually works fine.

When moving/racking to a carboy from a bucket, you will often leave a fair amount of the yeast behind, so it can often take a couple of days for the ferment to build back up. Plus the bubbling might be to do with you having stirred/aerated it.

It's why the best checks are done with a hydrometer, because you've already noticed the difference between the amount of CO2 produced by bread yeast and the Montrachet. Well don't forget, the primary use of bread yeast is to make CO2 to cause the bread to raise/prove. Yes it also does convert sugars to alcohol, but the wine yeast is more efficient at doing that isn't it.

If you knew what the gravity was at the start i.e. before pitching yeast, then you can monitor it so that it get aerated daily (some like twice daily) until it hit the 1/3rd sugar break. Which is usually when people stop aeration. Plus the start of the visible ferment is when half the total nutrient is added for a staggered nutrient addition technique and the 1/3rd break is often where the rest of the nutrient is added.

Did the turkey baster and the ph test.

Proof: 9
Tralle: 5
PH: looking at the color cues, very low

Now I'm getting 1 bubble every 49.2 secs. Any ideas???

clcarlton said:

Did the turkey baster and the ph test.

Proof: 9
Tralle: 5

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The proof reading ? well it might be better if you can give a gravity reading as that's gonna tell us how much sugars are still left in the ferment. It only matters what the alcohol content is at the end (plus proof is misleading, percentage proof is approximately half the alcohol content i.e. 9 proof and 5 tralle etc etc)

PH: looking at the color cues, very low

Now I'm getting 1 bubble every 49.2 secs. Any ideas???

Click to expand...

Bubble rate is a very poor measure of how a ferment is progressing (see above). As for pH ? Well the "sweet spot" is about 3.4pH though higher wouldn't normally matter.

If it's lower i.e. especially if it's below 3.0, then that might easily be why it's fermenting slowly. Yesties like an acid environment, but not too acid.

If you think that it's possible that the ferment might be below 3.0pH then maybe it's an idea to search for something to reduce acid levels/increase the pH

regards

fatbloke