Is the mold?

[owenstravis]

Excuse the autocorrect title. Should’ve been, “Is This Mold??”

I’m relatively new to homebrewing and I decided to make a peach wine on 2/27/2020. I left the peaches in bags in the wine and stirred daily. I just racked off the fruit and lees, and found this on the bottom of my bucket. Is this something normal or a mold and I should dump the batch?

The gravity is at 1.043 currently, so I’m not excited expecting a huge amount of fermentation to cause blow off. The second picture is just after racking.

 

[owenstravis]

I’m not sure how mold would grow on the bottom, but then again, I’ve only got about 12 gallons of wine and beer under my belt. Working on 2 gallons of mead too.
I’m thinking it’s stuff that fell off the frozen peaches, but I’m not sure.

For what it’s worth, it’s at about 6ish ABV right now and tastes really good.

 

[RPh_Guy]

It's not mold. Mold would only grow on the surface.

 

[bernardsmith]

Hi owenstravis - and welcome. Two thoughts. The first is that it is unlikely to be mold (or mould) because spoilage bacteria tend to need oxygen and so any mold would be on the surface and not on the bottom of your fermenter - and the mold would be on the fruit and not where the photo suggests this material is.

That said, my :"guess" is that what you see are lees. This is the sediment that comes from yeast that have dropped out of solution and from fruit particles and tannins and fibers that are the detritus left after the yeast have broken down sugars. In short - so very normal that if you did not find this then THAT would be surprising

My second thought is that you wrote that you had racked this peach wine AND that the gravity when you racked was 1.043. This leads me to a question: why did you rack your wine so quickly? You very likely left behind a very significant part of the active yeast colony. Best to rack when the active fermentation is coming to a halt - and it comes to a halt when there is virtually no sugar remaining for the yeast to ferment. Racking when you still have more than a pound (half a kilo) of sugar left in every gallon (4 L) is not good practice.

Now, you may have wanted to remove the fruit. And that does make good sense but if you add fruit to the primary and you intend to remove the fruit before you need to rack then you can simply place the fruit in a bag, use a bucket as your primary and pull out the bag at any time think the fruit has given out all the flavors you want and none of the more vegetable flavors that they can sometimes express if you leave the fruit steeping too long. You say you had bagged the fruit so you likely used a bucket, so racking would seem to me to have been premature. However, if the fermentation is continuing without any problem then no harm, no foul.

 

[owenstravis]

Thank all of you for your quick replies!

Mysecond thought is that you wrote that you had racked this peach wine AND that the gravity when you racked was 1.043. This leads me to a question: why did you rack your wine so quickly? You very likely left behind a very significant part of the active yeast colony. Best to rack when the active fermentation is coming to a halt - and it comes to a halt when there is virtually no sugar remaining for the yeast to ferment. Racking when you still have more than a pound (half a kilo) of sugar left in every gallon (4 L) is not good practice.

Now, you may have wanted to remove the fruit. And that does make good sense but if you add fruit to the primary and you intend to remove the fruit before you need to rack then you can simply place the fruit in a bag, use a bucket as your primary and pull out the bag at any time think the fruit has given out all the flavors you want and none of the more vegetable flavors that they can sometimes express if you leave the fruit steeping too long. You say you had bagged the fruit so you likely used a bucket, so racking would seem to me to have been premature. However, if the fermentation is continuing without any problem then no harm, no foul.

My thoughts were similar, I figured it was probably lees and random bits of material, especially since no off flavor or smells.

Now the reason I racked is because, while I did use bags, one had a rip I didn’t originally see and wound up spilling some peaches out. In order to remain as clean as possible, I racked off the fruit after a bit. Now we’ll see if I messed up the fermentation lol!

I’m hoping to get this to a 10-12% ABV, I can’t remember if I used D47 or US-05, I assume D47, but I was in a hurry and didn’t take my usual notes .

mom more of a sweet wine person, I’m not cultured enough for dry wines, so if I messed it up, some, I won’t be too upset haha!

 

[RPh_Guy]

mold (or mould) because spoilage bacteria tend to need oxygen

Mold isn't a bacterium, it's a fungus (but yes, it does need oxygen).

 

[bernardsmith]

Mold isn't a bacterium, it's a fungus (but yes, it does need oxygen).

I sit - and stand - corrected