Pellicle?

[Steinaken]

So i wanted to vrew a ginger mead. I used ~2kg of ginger and a little over a kilo of honey +~2kg of granny smith apples. It formed a waxy kind of pellicle on top, and necer really took off - fermented out from 1.046 sg to 1.002, but had an off flavour. So i threw it into another bucket with fresh yeast for a week to hopefully mellow the off flavour in the body. I added another 500g of sugar to feed the yeast, + nutrients. Now im taking it out again, no krausen at all, but tge pellicle is back. Heres a photo. This look ok?

 

[Steinaken]

Also stayed around 14C.which i thought was pretty low

 

[RPh_Guy]

This look ok?

It's a pellicle, and there's way too much headspace.
Can you describe the off-flavor?

 

[Steinaken]

Sorry, i tooknthat shot as i was siphinong over. Off flavour at room temp tasted a bit borderline synthetic something tbh - possibly described as green apple maybe. Chilled it tasted like i bit into a chunk of whole ginger with peel on. I dont know how else to describe it.
My plan with putting on fresh yeast was to krausenate out the off flavour and any potential acetylaldehyde

 

[RPh_Guy]

Off flavour at room temp tasted a bit borderline synthetic something tbh - possibly described as green apple maybe. Chilled it tasted like i bit into a chunk of whole ginger with peel on.

Those are the things you used in the recipe ... Maybe you just don't like the recipe?

Personally I think it's a way better approach to just make a quality dry wine (mead in this case) and then sweeten and add flavors to taste after stabilizing. This makes it much easier to identify the source of off flavors and makes it much easier to get the right flavor profile.

 

[Steinaken]

So i put it back into a bucket and pitched fresh yeast with nutrient and a week later it looks like this :/

 

[RPh_Guy]

It's normal to have a pellicle when wild microbes are present and there's oxygen exposure.

https://***************.com/wiki/Pellicle

 

[Steinaken]

This white stuff looks like tiny grains of white rice, has no real texture or taste beyond very slightly slimy... I just wasnt expecting it since that was effectively racked and wanted to bottle - byt wanted to makesure it wasn't likely to be infected first

 

[RPh_Guy]

No amout of racking will remove the mixed culture of wild yeast and bacteria. In this case the pellicle is completely normal and expected.