Berry bomb melomel filtering question

[Captain Grey]

Hi all. I'm having a unique issue that I am struggling to find an answer to online:

Uninspired by my last berry mead feeling empty on the back end, I decided to try and make a berry bomb.

The berries were under pectic enzyme for a full week in the fridge, after that I pulled it out, filtered out as much of the solids as I could (keeping as much juice as humanly possible) and added honey, yeast, etc.

Following primary, I racked that into a container through a straining bag (https://www.wilko.com/en-uk/wilko-fruit-straining-bag/p/0468413) and homogenised - it has been sat settling out since then, as seen in the pictures attached.

My problem comes in that that is a lot of fruit solid that has dropped out of suspension, and there is going to be a fair amount of lost yield in there.

I have seen some talk about nut milk bags, and will be getting one to test if that works, but other than that I can only find info about keg to keg beer filtering systems, I was wondering if there was another way - something finer than the nut milk bag, while not requiring me to buy kegs?

 

[MightyMosin]

You can try multiple fine mesh bags over the end of your auto siphon but that may not be fine enough.

KLR makes a gravity feed filter where the 50 micron filter followed by the 5 would probably get what you need.

The 50 will drain/filter fast enough. The 5 will likely require you to actively pump it with the auto siphon unless your carboy has a spigot on the bottom and you are really patient for the gravity feed to work.

 

[Captain Grey]

You can try multiple fine mesh bags over the end of your auto siphon but that may not be fine enough.

KLR makes a gravity feed filter where the 50 micron filter followed by the 5 would probably get what you need.

The 50 will drain/filter fast enough. The 5 will likely require you to actively pump it with the auto siphon unless your carboy has a spigot on the bottom and you are really patient for the gravity feed to work.

That actually sounds perfect.

I'm going to be experimenting with a nut milk filter bag first, but will keep an eye on KLR for when their systems are back in stock. Thank you

 

[Captain Grey]

As an update:

I tried first round of filtering for a mango bomb mead first, to test the process and because the particulates should (in theory) be much more fibrous and likely to get caught in the bag as the holes are like 75 micron.

I tied the bag to my siphon tube and just racked, but found that it blocked the bag a *lot* - I had to go through a process of squeezing in order to get the liquid out. for technique, I found that grabbing a corner and using the same hand motion as milking a cow worked best, and whenever the 'goop' was thick enough, pushing it up in the bag allowed me to keep going.

As you can see, the 'after' has started to settle out nicely and should filter easily enough when the next round of racking is needed (And when KLR restocks their filters)

So yes. Lots learned from this

 

[MightyMosin]

I tend to put my fruit in a bag to make it easier to extract later

 

[Captain Grey]

I tend to put my fruit in a bag to make it easier to extract later

both of these brews have been 4 Kg of fruit all broken down under pectic enzyme, so not the easiest of options.