Sour/acidity to mead

[darkshardx]

As you may have seen me posting, I recently bottled my first mead after bulk aging for 6 months. Upon tasting, the mead has a strange...somewhat unpleasant acid-like flavor to it. My wife says that it tastes sort of rubber-like to her, that the mead was more "acrid than mellow like expected". Since it tastes acid-like to me, I added some Potassium Bicarbonate to a glass of the mead which seemed to reduce the harsh flavor, but also seemed to take some of the "good" flavors with it.

Is this simply a matter that aging further will take care of, or might this be a PH issue that I can adjust manually? Any ideas what the issue might be? Thanks!

 

[darkshardx]

If it helps, I followed the recipe here fort the "basic traditional mead": https://www.homebrewtalk.com/current-mead-making-techniques.html but scaled it up to 3 gallons, used potassium bicarbonate, and D-47 yeast.

 

[bernardsmith]

The suggestion that there is a rubbery smell points to stressed yeast and their production of what is called mercaptans. Often the problem is caused by a lack of sufficient organic nitrogen - so you may have used too little nutrient or a nutrient with too little usable nitrogen. Mercaptans are a problem to remove. One possible solution (I have never used this product ) is Reduless - http://www.scottlab.com/product-119.aspx. You might also try racking through copper wool. The idea is that you introduce copper (Reduless is also copper based) and the copper binds with the sulfur the yeast has produced creating copper sulfate and removing the dimethyl sulfide (AKA mercaptan). If I am correct and the problem is dimethyl sulfide aging will not solve this problem nor will increasing the pH.
Good luck.