Drawbacks of using quickly frozen fruit for melomels

[JRW1]

Hey HBT,
So in the future I want to make many melomels, they just sound so amazing. Right now I have a peach tea mead and a show mead fermenting since march 28.
I want to add about 3 lbs of peaches to the peach tea mead to upp the peachyness. The problem I have is that when I tried JAOM, the fruit turned grey and the mead tasted really awful, think it was due to contaminants from using fruit that wasnt sanitized, but I also could be wrong about that because people seem to add unsanitized fruit to their meads all the time and they do fine due to high alcohol content.
Sanitized fruit to me would mean frozen for a night or so or a couple hours to kill bacteria coming from wherever the peach has touched anything. I've heard that freezing takes away some of the aroma of the peach and some of the flavor too. So with this batch and all future batches should I get organic fruit from the store, cut it, wash it, and throw it in the fermenter, OR cut it, wash it, then freeze it for 3 or more hours then let it thaw in its freezing container and then throw it in with washed hands?

TLDR
Add sanitized frozen fruit to secondary or only washed fruit straight from the store?

 

[bssrf4]

Add sanitized frozen fruit to secondary or only washed fruit straight from the store?

I freeze the fruit in a bag for a day or so, let it thaw, then dump it in.

 

[JRW1]

cool, just read the notes i took from the BOMM thread and added frozen mango to my show mead, before racking though so next time i rack i'll have to rack it off of yeast and fruit. oh well.

 

[Arpolis]

I want to point out that freezing will not sanitize your fruit. You can get an infection just as easily from frozen fruit as you can non-frozen. Peaches are awful to freeze and thaw because they turn into a stringy soup of goo. Very hard to manage if not using a bucket.

Meads often do not need to sanitize ingredients beyond washing off with water. If you really want to be careful a small dip in some vodka works or do what they do in the wine world all the time and use a crushed Camden tablet per gallon 24 hours before you pitch yeast. Just mix up the must with all ingredients, add Camden, wait a day then add yeast. The alcohol content is high enough in secondary usually that this is not needed.

 

[JRW1]

hmm, i guess i need to do some more research then. does freezing just make the bacteria go dormant then instead of providing an environment where they cant survive and thus die? thats what i thought it would do.

 

[fuelish]

Freezing can kill some unwanted "visitors," but, yeah, some will just go dormant ...I've thrown IQF fruits in primary ferment, never had a problem....ymmv

 

[Matrix4b]

I think with JAOM style you put the fruit in the primary. I have not done this with my meads. I put the fruit in the secondary. I usually freeze the fruit for a couple of days to weeks due to the availibility of the fruit and when I need it but when I get it fresh and put it in fresh, I just put it in the secondary. No worries that it will ferment a bit as I am not stablizing the mead. Just racking off when the time is right and it slows down (almost stopped) and when I get a good yeast pack at the bottom.
I did this with a Strawberry Lychee that I am doing for a friend. I waited until the mead was starting to clear and I could see a big difference between the yeast pack and mead. Then I racked off to my brew bucket and put in the strawberries, Low and behold it started fermenting again. So without stablization, add sugar, equals more fermentation.

When I back sweeten it I will stablize it. But my point is, when the fruit is in the secondary the mead has about 10% (if you are lucky) ABV%. That is enough to sanitize most infections. Ofcourse you also need to start off with clean fruit, cutting out any rotton bits, if any. Just wash or rince the fruit.

In the case of the peaches..Did you remove the pits and skins? Sometimes the skins can make it taste awful.

The 2 peaches I did with frozen fruit, no lack of scent or flavor was detected it was strong and good. I used 12 pounds for a 5 gal batch.

Matrix

 

[IJesusChrist]

Don't put whole peaches in. The seeds have cyanide compounds, which if left in a aqueous environment for a long period of time could leach out.

Nobody wants cyanide poisoning.

 

[fatbloke]

Don't put whole peaches in. The seeds have cyanide compounds, which if left in a aqueous environment for a long period of time could leach out.

Nobody wants cyanide poisoning.

See I seem to recall you have some sort of tech/sci background (or am I thinking of someone else) ?

But this kind of thing has A, been known since the year dot and B, is the kind of n00b scaremongering that just isn't helpful......

Most fruit with stone or pip contain some cyanide compounds. Equally, every ferment will contain some methanol. So maybe you should stop drinking any alcoholic beverage, just in case you go blind or explode like a top fuel dragster at a race track !......

It's invariably suggested that if stones/pips/pits/whatever are of a manageable size then remove them, less about bloody cyanide and more about practical fruit/sediment management. Equally, the OPs query about freezing etc ? Well as lots of fruit, especially soft summer fruit has tiny seeds that are almost impossible to remove, the freeze/thaw method of preserving both allows yeast cells in to metabolise sugars or release the juice for flavouring/sweetness with damaging the seeds and potentially release some bittering compounds into the brew (can't recall whether theyre routinely water or alcohol soluble).

QED, I'm not getting on your case, but its easy to bandy around such, well, urban myth so that becomes the only point of focus that people latch onto and panic (aluminium causes alzheimers etc). Besides you wouldn't eat a stone/pit anyways and despite the presence of the compounds you allude too, you'd need to eat a sh1tload of apples (pips and all), before there is any toxicity risk and drinking normally produced alcohol drinks, your liver would give out before you went blind.........

So perspective my friend, perspective........

Oh and apart from cysers and the like, I store my fruit as matrix says, but I often split it to a quarter or third in primary, and the rest in secondary, as I like them to have a fair bit of the original flavour/character but not so the fruit flavour is too strong. And yes, I do routinely back sweeten them as a lot of the original fruit flavour comes from the fruit sugars........

just my tuppence worth........

 

[Matrix4b]

Thanks for the confirm, Fat Bloke.

Oh, incidently. Removing the skins on peaches is easy. Just use the blanching method and they pop right off. Just be careful as they are slippery.

Blanching: Put in boiling water for about 1 min, then pop into a bowl of ice water. This makes it so that you can practically rub off the skin with a paper towel or rag. But beware, do not cut your hands when you try to remove the pit. It will be very slippery.

Matrix

 

[IJesusChrist]

Most of the cyanide compounds are bound to the seed - they aren't HCN, they are complex cyanides, which are likely safe to be ingested - however, adding energy and hydrolysis can activate these, cleaving off HCN.

For instance, a friend of mine while in the Israeli army, isolated pure HCN from peach pits as a 'project'. About 1 cup of pits is enough to kill someone, but again, to actually reach a lethal dose you would need to crush the pits, boil the pits, and/or add acid (or base) and boil.

Then drink up... So no, its not a real worry, but stranger things have happened.

And yeah I'm a chemist / plant biologist.

Unreliable source tells me 9 people have died from stone fruit pits in the past half century.

 

[MarshmallowBlue]

Who's putting peach pits in the mead anyways? That's just wasted volume.