Degassing

[Plumeja]

I just added my oak piece to my mead and when I dropped it in there was a large amount of gas released. I have been fermenting this 23liters for the last three months and I noticed that there was very little activity coming from the airlock. I was wondering if I should be doing something else once I rack it over. I am planing on letting it ferment out over a year before I even think of bottling it.
Not sure if I should use any additive to stop or slow fermentation. So far I have only mixed honey water yeast. Three months later the one once of oak (honeycombed).
Any extra info would
Be awesome.

 

[bernardsmith]

One of the effects of adding anything with tiny rough surfaces to your liquor is that the points in the surface nucleate the gas that is absorbed in the liquid. And what that does (and I am not a physicist so I may have this wrong) is that it enables the gas to combine with far less energy than it would otherwise require. When the gas (the CO2) combines in the liquid the liquid cannot keep it absorbed and it expels itself as "large" bubbles. So the action you see has nothing to do with current fermentation or refermentation but is about the mead giving up CO2.
In fact one of the ways of degassing according to Daniel Pambianchi is to add (sanitized) tiny stainless steel screws or silicone fasteners.