Acidic taste after fruiting during secondary fermentation. Can I save the mead?

[Robert Jass]

Hey everyone, this was my first attempt at making a melomel. During my secondary fermentation I added about 2.5lbs of fruit to 3 different 1 gal batches. Fruit used was blueberries, raspberries and bananas. The fruit sat in the secondary for about 1.5 months and after I removed the fruit by re-racking the melomel I tasted all 3. The blueberry and raspberry variants both smelled amazing but the taste had a slight acidic/tanic flavor. Is this normal after using berries? Has anyone else had this issue? What can I do to fix the taste? Thanks for the help.

 

[Silver_Is_Money]

The only way I can think of to reduce the acidity is to add a pinch of baking soda and stir it in well. Be careful to leave some acidity though. Titration would be your best bet. A pH meter wouldn't hurt either.

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[Robert Jass]

The only way I can think of to reduce the acidity is to add a pinch of baking soda and stir it in well. Be careful to leave some acidity though. Titration would be your best bet. A pH meter wouldn't hurt either.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0064OFUCY/?tag=skimlinks_replacement-20

Thank you for the tips. I will plan to purchase a acid testing kit. Would back sweetening help in anyway?

 

[Silver_Is_Money]

Thank you for the tips. I will plan to purchase a acid testing kit. Would back sweetening help in anyway?

Sorry, can't help you there. Out of my realm of experience.

 

[RPh_Guy]

Acidity is normal in fruit. Fruit contains various organic acids.

You have 3 options to reduce the acidic taste (you can use any or all of them):
1. Malolactic fermentation. Bacteria can convert some of the stronger organic acids into lactic acid, which is less sour tasting. The process can take a couple months.
2. Use potassium carbonate/bicarbonate (preferred) or calcium carbonate to precipitate the organic acids out of solution. This process can take a few days to weeks (with cold crashing) for the potassium salt or a couple months for the calcium salt.
Sodium bicarbonate (baking soda) is not used for some reason; I'm guessing that it won't precipitate the organic acids, and thus doesn't work.
3. Sweeten the wine. Sweet taste balances acidity. The effect is immediate.

Titratable Acidity (TA) is the best representation of acidic taste. The pH itself does not affect taste, nor does it strongly correlate with TA.

Cheers

 

[Klinzai]

You could do some bench testing with 1% or 10% solutions. When you make your test solutions remember they will be 1 gram with distilled water up to 100 ml for 1% or 10 grams up to 100ml with distilled water for 10%. use 100 ml samples of the mead and dose in .25 to 1 ml amounts of your dosing solution (.25, .5, .75, 1, 1.25 etc)

Try it with
potassium carbonate/bicarbonate.
*Go with the smallest addition that achieves your goal

Sweetener (honey or other sweetener of choice)
I'd still use grams and milliliters and use several increments to get the mount you want to use. Scale up to the size of your batch and go from there.

In the end you may end up doing a little of both.

 

[RPh_Guy]

I agree bench trials are good, but in a 1 gallon batch it might be wasteful if you don't have a general idea where to start.

The best way imo would be to measure TA (citric acid). Then trial small samples by adjusting TA in 0.5g/L increments.
You maybe want a TA around 5? It's a personal taste.
I've heard that measuring TA in mead isn't very accurate, but it's better than nothing.

Here's a good calculator
http://fermcalc.com/FermCalcJS.html
As Klinzai suggested, it would be wise to make stock solutions since it's only about 0.02g of potassium bicarbonate to lower TA by 0.5 in a 50mL sample.

Winemaking is a lot of chemistry lab fun sometimes