I am brewing a sweet, pure mead(5gallon carboy 15 lbs of honey). i have already finished fermentation, added sorbate and metabisulfite and reracked into carboy from fermenter and letting age. I have read that i need to wait for it to be clear which i know can take a very long time but meanwhile a white sediment has formed at the bottom, i was fairly careful to not transfer the trub after fermentation so im not sure what it is. Also there is a small amount of what looks like pollen in the mead forming a ring where the surface touches the glass.
Need some advice.
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Looks pretty normal to me. The White sediment is yeast and any other solids that still might have been suspended falling out of solution over time. The ring of "pollen"?? is the same but suspended due to small amount of CO2 attached or just as a small amount of surface tension to the surface and glass..
I agree with CKuhns. I follow Yooper's recommendation ( and probably others, but I read it in a post from Yooper first): Rack every time the lees (sediment) is 1/4" or more until there are no more lees and the mead is clear. Then bottle. Add one campden tab per gallon at every other racking to prevent oxidation. For me, depending on the yeast strain, this might take 3-4 rackings over a 2-3 month period.
I'm a fan of racking less instead of racking more. Nothing in that cake at the bottom will hurt your mead unless you let it sit for a LONG time (think a year or more). and you lose less to the racking process, with the reduced risk of an infection during the transfer process. You will also introduce less oxygen into your mead, for which at this point, oxygen is bad.
Aging is different than clarifying (although they can happen simultaneously) Aging is the process by which the alcohol and residual sugars and esters blend and mellow with age. I usually age most of my meads a minimum of 3 months, and some as long as 9 months. This has nothing to do with clarity mind you. Often they are clear within a few weeks of racking into settling carboys (I use SS conicals for primary fermentation and degas with a vacuum pump which drops most of the suspended yeasts). This has everything to do with flavor.
Other than that, it looks great!
One final tip if you want it to clear faster, you can stick the whole thing into a refrigerator (or outside depending on where you live) and do what is called 'cold crashing' which will drop things out of solution faster.
Aging is different than clarifying (although they can happen simultaneously) Aging is the process by which the alcohol and residual sugars and esters blend and mellow with age. I usually age most of my meads a minimum of 3 months, and some as long as 9 months. This has nothing to do with clarity mind you. Often they are clear within a few weeks of racking into settling carboys (I use SS conicals for primary fermentation and degas with a vacuum pump which drops most of the suspended yeasts). This has everything to do with flavor.
Other than that, it looks great!
One final tip if you want it to clear faster, you can stick the whole thing into a refrigerator (or outside depending on where you live) and do what is called 'cold crashing' which will drop things out of solution faster.
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