Ah-ha! Brilliant, I will certainly be using a bucket next time round.
Its my first melomel and I think I severely underestimated just how much the yeast would love all those berries. It seems to be a bit more stable now though so I might hold off extracting any of it for the meantime as while its a bit messy and red the airlock hasn't been compromised.
I've also moved it out from the boiler cupboard and covered it up somewhere to cool off as I it was probably running a bit too hot now that the weather here's picked up.
Many thanks for the advice!
When does the weather ever get hot in the Manchester area ? Whenever we go to Wigan for a rugby match (herindoors follows them), or we go up to her family around Lancaster, as soon as you cross the ship canal, it always seems to be pissing down
The thing with the bucket Vs carboy/DJ is that if you make it in a bucket, it's easier to manage the ferment and control it so you don't get a mead eruption, but once it's basically finished, it's easily racked off the sediment etc so you can see what's going on as far as clearing etc, is concerned (looks nicer if you have to keep the DJ's out on show as you've nowhere to store them).
You didn't say what yeast you used. I use the Lalvin brand stuff, which can be found mail order (actually I use mainly either D21 which is harder to get, or K1V-1116, which is the lalvin packaged version of what the Late brother Adam used to use down at Buckfast Abbey - it seems that he probably used the Gervin version, packaged as "Varietal E", but it's harder to find a home brew shop that sells it - they often have to order it in, so it's easier to get the Lalvin one).
Whats Manchester water like ? Ours is hard, with lots of chalk/calcium in it, so I've started to use "reverse osmosis" water from the local aquarium shop (£3 for 25 litres). All the **** you'll read about the yeast needing some trace elements from the water is bollocks. If the yeast relied on the bloody water for trace elements, you'd have to ferment in raw sewage to have enough nitrogen for the yeast! And you're not gonna be doing that any time soon (hey! maybe....... whatever presses your buttons eh
). The RO water thing has worked well.
If you have a read of my blog, there's a load of links on the right, some of which are links for UK based suppliers and/or UK based info - there's a few international ones two. I mail order stuff from both Belgium (
Brouwland) and a few places in the US as well.
I don't know if my mail order stuff is any better than the stuff you can get locally, but it does help when following a method or recipe, as you can copy it as closely as possible. Plus with Lalvin yeasts, they publish more info/data about them (and their other products like the FermaidK nutrients and other stuff) than any other manufacturer - which means you can work **** out more accurately and design and manage recipes more easily...... s'up to you eh!
Enough of my ranting/bollocks/suggestions and guidance for now
regards
fatbloke
p.s. Oh and you still might find, that once the melomel has finished it's ferment, that it's not "fruity" enough to your taste. A lot of people will put half the fruit into a primary ferment, then let it finish and stabilise the brew before putting the rest of the fruit in. It makes for a more fruit tasting batch, that's often drinkable earlier, and also means it suffers less from any bleaching action of the yeast during ferment and you get a better colour.
