Milk Vetch Honey?

[FatDragon]

Haha, thanks for the understanding. In my very limited mead experience, I have done one batch with suspect honey that took three different yeast pitches and several months to reach roughly 50% apparent attenuation and never went past that. I rarely worry about anything with my beer brewing even when I totally screw something up and should be worried, because I've got the experience to know it'll come out okay, or at least to know what is likely to go wrong if I screwed it up too badly. With mead, about a quarter of my experience is a batch that totally failed, so that's my baseline expectation so I ask a lot of questions to try to avoid repeating it.

 

[CKuhns]

Read this - Hope it helps.

 

[FatDragon]

Read this - Hope it helps.

Thanks, I love it! It's dense with useful guidance but your voice also makes it an enjoyable read throughout. Have you talked with the admins about making it a front page article? It would probably need some trimming or editing into multiple parts, but it would work well there.

I degassed for the umpteenth time and added the last nutrient dose last night. At seven days it was pretty much right at the 1/3 sugar break. How important is degassing at this point? Should I continue to baby them for a while, or is this a good time to forget about them for the next month or so?

 

[CKuhns]

Thanks for the kind words. No, have not spoken to an Admin. First time I have posted this.

I would let it do its thing from here on out. Observe it daily check SG every couple days and maybe even taste it once a week. After you get a couple under your belt you will get a "feel" for it.

I dont believe that releasing CO2 / adding a little air does much for you past 1/3 sugar break. Thats when the yeast need the air to promote budding. In-fact could cause more harm than good after that as everytime you open it you take the chance albiet small of introducing something undesirable.

 

[FatDragon]

16 days in, down from 24-25p to 12p, so about 50% attenuation so far. Weather's been pretty steady so they're holding around 19-20 C, and the airlocks have been bubbling at a steady rate since I put them on. Interestingly, with two identical airlocks over virtually identical must, with identical liquid levels in the airlocks, one airlock makes small bubbles every five seconds or so while the other makes much bigger bubbles once every ten to fifteen seconds. The liquid in the small bubbling airlock basically never retreats past the lower bend where it bubbles, but in the big bubbler, it moves back an extra centimeter or so every time it releases a bubble. It's probably just due to something like a slight difference in the angle of one of the airlocks, how well the jugs are sealed, or the amount of headspace (jug A had a little volcano during one stirring/degassing session and lost about 100 ml), but it fascinates me nevertheless.

In a few days, I'll have my ferm chamber running around 21 C after I let the US-05 in the APA I just pitched do most of its work at a more suitable initial temperature. At that point, I'll probably transfer the jugs of mead in there and set the temp probe on one of them. My theory is that the lower thermal mass of the mead fermenters will be quickly cooled by the freezer whenever it kicks on, while the big beer fermenters will have more freedom to free rise, which is just fine for an APA dry hopping at the tail end of primary fermentation and a Brett saison. Meanwhile letting the mead go to 21C should help the yeast work a bit better without much risk of fusels or off flavors, since the yeast should already be in anaerobic fermentation by now.

 

[CKuhns]

Sounds like it is going well. Yes, i agree watching a ferment is intriguing. I am learning that some yeast like warmer temps without throwing off flavors. I use US-05 for cider that seems to do pretty well a little warmer. I just racked a Mead (hydromel 5.2 ABV) ftom secondary after adfing 1oz oak chips for 5 days. I used Omega Hothead liquid yeast and fermented at 88F (31C) with no off flavors. Force carbing it in a keg and will be very good for a lighter summer drink. looks like i might have to update my Drunken Ramblings...

 

[FatDragon]

The chamber is up to my preferred temp, but the jugs are too tall to sit on the shoulder with their airlocks. Should I replace the airlocks with sanitized foil or just leave the jugs out of the chamber?

 

[Maylar]

Use a blow off tube? You'll gain a couple inches of height.

 

[NeverDie]

If that^ is still too tight, some of the waterless airlocks require almost no clearance.

 

[FatDragon]

Brew log time:

I've been too busy (for sure) and lazy (maybe some of that too) to set up blow off tubes and transfer the mead to the fermentation chamber… until tonight, when I finally found my druthers (they were [it was?] in my sock drawer the whole time) and got the mead set up in the chamber as described before: 21C, probe insulated on the side of a mead jug, heating wire in place if the temp drops too low.

Jug A, which has fermented a bit more strongly the whole time and started at a slightly higher gravity (+1 Plato at most) is around 8p from 25p OG. Jug B started around 24p and is down to 10p. It had me worried because it had stopped bubbling entirely lately and seemed like it might have stalled, but it's down 2-3p from my last reading four or five days ago so it's not dead yet. Remember, my last attempt at making a mead with suspect Chinese honey stalled around 50% AA and wouldn't budge regardless of what yeast I threw at it from there, so I have experience to justify my new-breweresque jitters with this batch.

The drips off of the (sanitized, of course!) hydrometer taste good. Sweet, but otherwise good. My mother in law stayed with us for the last few months to help take care of our new daughter and kept telling me she loved the smell of the fermenting mead, even more than the mind blowing aroma of a hoppy pale ale dry hopping with Citra, Simcoe, and El Dorado mid fermentation. Here's hoping it's ready, or close enough, by Dragon Boat Festival. We've got a couple months to go...

 

[FatDragon]

Well poop. Three days in the ferm chamber and there has been no appreciable gravity drop. Still at 8p and 10p respectively. I'll probably give them a few more days and then try the champagne yeast that I have. The last time I tried using cheap honey here I got about 50% apparent attenuation, so maybe the adulterated honey here (which China is notorious for) is cut with (or perhaps more likely, the hives are fed with) something non-fermentable. I guess if this is as far as it goes, the in-laws won't know the difference. Heck, I'm not sure I'd know the difference. Not really, at least, since my mead experience is extremely limited.

 

[Maylar]

You might notice your teeth hurting with all that sugar...

 

[NeverDie]

Well poop. Three days in the ferm chamber and there has been no appreciable gravity drop. Still at 8p and 10p respectively. I'll probably give them a few more days and then try the champagne yeast that I have. The last time I tried using cheap honey here I got about 50% apparent attenuation, so maybe the adulterated honey here (which China is notorious for) is cut with (or perhaps more likely, the hives are fed with) something non-fermentable. I guess if this is as far as it goes, the in-laws won't know the difference. Heck, I'm not sure I'd know the difference. Not really, at least, since my mead experience is extremely limited.

Maybe the SG is high merely because of the lead and the arsenic found in chinese honey.

 

[FatDragon]

Gee, thanks for the votes of confidence.

 

[FatDragon]

More brew log:

After a week or so in the ferm chamber, I noticed a couple spots of mold growing on the jug handles. I sprayed them with starsan and racked the mead to a couple other jugs, transferring as much yeast as I could along the way since I don't think they're done yet. I added half a packet of Danstar Abbaye to each jug while I racked because I had it on hand (it was a freebie at a local brew club meeting) and I thought fresh yeast and a new strain might help drop a few more points. Anyway, it can't hurt, right?

One benefit of racking was that I went from 5L jugs with a bit of headspace to 4.5L jugs with almost no headspace. I took a reading of one of the jugs while racking, which I'm 90% sure was the 10p one, and got 8p, so it seems there was a bit of activity still going on which is encouraging.

I also took a towel and mopped up the considerable condensation in the fermentation chamber in hopes of keeping the relative humidity down and preventing another mold issue. In the same vein, I kept the lid open while the heating wire brought the mead back up to temp, and dropped the controller about half a degree - closer to ambient - so it doesn't need to kick in as much, which should prevent a bit of extra evaporation and condensation as well as reducing how often any potential mold spores get an extra kick of warmth to kick-start their growth.

Oh, and the hydrometer sample was tasty. Sweet, but not undrinkably so. If it's stuck here, the in-laws should still enjoy it.

 

[FatDragon]

I moved the mead to 4.5L jugs a few weeks ago and they've cleared up to read-a-newspaper-through-the-glass levels in that time. Both batches definitely finished at 8p. There's a bit of acidity which counters the sweetness well, and it's not crazy sweet. Although it's not a perfect brew, I'm sure people have made worse meads and believed they were drinking world-class stuff.

One batch went into bottles last night. I've got a bag of Lapsang Souchong tea and I was thinking of tossing it into the second batch for a day or two before bottling it in order to add some tannin and smoke. We'll see how that goes.

 

[FatDragon]

This morning, after about eight hours of infusion, I took a taste. Distinct notes of bacon-like smoke. I'm not sure how I feel about it... This tea seems like it would be a good way to make a Rauchbier or smoked porter. Not much tannin yet. It stands to note that the tea bag is dangling near the neck of the jug and I took my sample from there, so it's likely the smoky flavor isn't diffused through the whole batch at the level I got in my sample. I plan to pull it tonight and if I feel the mead needs more tannins, I'll do a second, longer tea addition, this time with aged raw pu-er, which is more tannic than most teas. Younger pu-er is much more tannic still, but I don't have anything less than six or seven years old so aged tea will have to do.