do I need to secondary sparkling mead?

[rhys333]

I thought I'd try my hand at making a sparkling mead, which according to the recipe is about 5.4% abv and ready to drink in about the same amount of time as your average beer.

The recipe calls for 7-10 days primary, then racking to secondary until completion. This is more of an experiment for me and i really don't want to tie up my beer fermentors for an extended period... so I thought I'd dust off the old 3 gal carboy and do a single stage fermentation. Is this okay for mead, or should I really be including a secondary stage? If okay, any risk of blow off with 3 gals liquid and an airlock?

Thanks in advance for any advice on this...

 

[MarshmallowBlue]

All my hydromels ( less that 9% abv) are primary only. I have a vanilla Hydromel that I started a little while ago and it's ready to bottle whenever I feel the vanilla is where I want it. (it will also be sparkling).

The reason for secondary in mead is to get the mead off of bulk lees, so the yeast bed can't contribute off flavors down the bulk aging. But when you are working with a hydromel, your schedule from pitch to bottle is from 30-60 days. So as long as you didn't use 71B or whatever that yeast is that is prone to off flavors after ferment, you're fine.

Edit: Needing a blowoff in secondary will not be needed unnless you're adding fruit or anything. But I don't get nearly as much escaping mead as I do with beer. If you feel you may have overfilled your carboy, a blowoff tube won't hurt.

 

[rhys333]

All my hydromels ( less that 9% abv) are primary only. I have a vanilla Hydromel that I started a little while ago and it's ready to bottle whenever I feel the vanilla is where I want it. (it will also be sparkling).

The reason for secondary in mead is to get the mead off of bulk lees, so the yeast bed can't contribute off flavors down the bulk aging. But when you are working with a hydromel, your schedule from pitch to bottle is from 30-60 days. So as long as you didn't use 71B or whatever that yeast is that is prone to off flavors after ferment, you're fine.

Edit: Needing a blowoff in secondary will not be needed unnless you're adding fruit or anything. But I don't get nearly as much escaping mead as I do with beer. If you feel you may have overfilled your carboy, a blowoff tube won't hurt.

Thank you for the detailed explanation and sorry for not acknowledging earlier...lost track of this thread in all my beer related posts.