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Last year I bought some used gallon jugs from gumtree because they were cheap. As can be expected, a lot of them had soiled interiors. The labels suggested they had last been used in the early 1990s and mid 1980s. I managed to get some of them clean on the inside and put them to use. For the...

In hindsight, I should have done it in the sink lol that's where I rack after all. I think i liked the open space of the kitchen surface or something. I will use the sink for corking in the future, though.

I use the sodium metabisulphite rather than the potassium metabisulphite tbh and the instructions for that say 1 tsp per pint. The reason that i mentioned the citric acid thing is because a few people have said metabisulphite is more effective when used with it. I've also heard people say...

It is said to work better when combined with citric acid. I read somewhere that it should be one part potassium metabisulfite to four parts citric acid.

Buckwheat honey mead made in February 2014. There are five bottles but there would have been six if I hadn't broken it during the corking process, spilling mead, broken glass and blood over the kitchen floor and the kitchen surface. Not a good day.

I think that a bread yeast such as that would start fermenting pretty quick, which is a good thing.

I think you can it's just got a different taste profile to white sugar. In Finland they make Sima which is mostly Muscovado sugar and water with some seasonings. I heard they drink it when it's still fermenting, though, so I don't know what to think about it really.

I think that hot and spicy smell could age out. I had something similar with a buckwheat mead, it had a similar effect to inhaling the fumes from a sulfite solution. Not sure what it is, could be esters or phenols. The yeast probably reacted to the high temperatures you described and started...

Interesting points. I like a bone-dry cider though.

Might as well use it. It'll have different characteristics to a cold pressed cider but it should be drinkable all the same. One year when I was trying to fill a 25 litre container I didn't have enough juice to fill it to the top so I boiled the pressed pulp with water and sugar and strained it...

Does it smell like rotten eggs?

One of the first fermented beverages I made used demerera sugar. Grated some marrows, added demerara, then added more grated marrow, stacked it up in layers. Marrow leached out juices, melting the sugar which collected at the bottom of the bucket. Fermented this sugary concoction but it...

Absolutely. Leave it until the bubbling stops then rack it again off the sediment.

Sediment rising and falling is normal, it will cease when fermentation has stopped. The same thing happens when you add raisins or some other fruit to the vessel; they rise to the top, sink to the bottom and sometimes float at different depths like submarines. When they stay put at the bottom...

Nothing wrong with wanting to make a high alcohol mead, whatever floats your boat. I can see the attraction of having a high-alcohol batch, people pay good money for fortified wines in the 20% range, after all, and they don't tend to be college-kids (just) looking to get intoxicated but older...

I've never added Campden tablets to mead. I do, however, use a comination of sodium metabisulphate and citric acid to sanitise mead-making equipment. Only time I used Campden tablets was on a stinky-smelling blackberry wine that was only three months old and hadn't been given time to age.

I've got into the habit of adding two vitamin B1 tablets to my mead must at the beggining which it says is for "flower wine" which is deficient in it, as I can imagine honey and water is. For nutrients i add 4 or 5 1/4 tsps of Youngs yeast nutrient, the ingredients of which are diammonium...

OctoPA / OctoPaleAle

1) maybe for as long as you'd leave the skins in a wine must to make it red / add body. 2) if it was just plain honey and water I'd say no, just start it fermenting quick. But the raspberries might have had all manner of different types of flies crawling over them and may have maggots in them...

I'd, personally, add the raw spices to the mead but I don't have a huge amount of experience in the field of adding seasoning to home-fermented alcoholic beverages.