Curious...

Geosomin · Mar 4, 2012

Hello all.
I checked my malomel and after 2 weeks it's down from 1.12 to 0.98. :ban:

So I figure it's largely done fermenting and racked it into a carboy to settle and age. It smells nice with a slight appley scent. Since I made 6 L fresh apple juice (that was rather pulpy) as part of the starting mix there was a good 4L of apple sludge/yeast and such on the bottom of my primary pail when I racked it off out while siphoning it over & I was rather annoyed to have to leave behind almost gallon of goodness... I took some apple mush, but it didn't take long before it wouldn't siphon as it was too thick so I stopped. Not the end of the world. I plan to just leave it in a dark place to settle out for as long as it takes and bottle it in a few months.

My question is this: This means my 5 gallon carboy is only about 2/3 full. Is this going to be an issue for aging?

Other than go buy a few small carboys and racking the mead over (which I really don't want to do) I don't know what to do about it. Can I just leave it to age like that with the airlock on?? Things are going so well so far I'd hate to have it go sour on me...

056r · Mar 4, 2012

Too much headspace during aging will lead to oxidation unless you do something about the air in the top of the carboy. Some ways I've read about people dealing with it is to use glass marbles for aquariums to bring the liquid level up into the neck or you can use CO2 to blanket the mead and force the o2 out of the carboy.

Geosomin · Mar 4, 2012

I like the CO2 thing, but where would I get CO2 from to do this?

hewnizit · Mar 4, 2012

Canisters for paintballing will work

biochemedic · Mar 4, 2012

You could also try warming the carboy up and giving it a few good swirls...this can off-gas some of the dissolved CO2 in the mead itself.

Another quick and easy source of CO2 is a pellet or two of dry ice.

Geosomin · Mar 5, 2012

Thanks for all the ideas. I ended up just going the simplest route and buying a 3 gallon and 1 gallon carboy yesterday. I transferred the mead into that. The 3 gallon is nice and full with very little headspace and the 1 gallon is nearly full and has most of whatever leftover sludge was there form the first racking attempt. They're tucked away to do their thing now, so hopefully that is the best solution. It seemed simpler than trying to muck about. I work in a lab culturing bacteria and cell lines and it seemed to me that the more I would muck about with it trying to put CO2 in there the better chance I had of contaminating it, so I just sucked it up and spent a bit of $$.
BUT, as a bonus I now have an extra carboy to make some India pale ale in next weekend