Saturday, September 25, 2010

Occasional moments of confusion and indecision.....

Ok, so here's where I'm at........

I have a number of 1 gallon batches, some need bottling, some need racking, some need...... well something.......

I don't really want to bottle what needs bottling, because I like bulk ageing meads, I also like how they look in a 1 gallon glass demi-john jar.

So what's the problem?

Well, if I rack the ones that need racking then there's always some racking loses, so you'd normally top them up with something. Water ? Well I don't want to reduce the body of a finished mead/wine/whatever, or reduce the alcohol content. I can use "a similar mead/wine", but I don't really have anything that will do the job.

Then there's the ones that need bottling. My enolmatic vacuum bottler and it's associated filter tend to lose more than if I used something like a "Harris filter" type device - I actually have the older "Boots" filter, but I'm still not a big fan of those as they seem to rely on sitting on top of a demi-john 1 gallon jar, and the wine then splashes into the receiving jar below. I don't like the idea of splashing the wines as it can lead to oxidisation (yes I know that meads don't tend to suffer as badly as other wines, I still don't like the idea......)

What the hell, I might just do that anyway and then just top them up with some of the chenin blanc "panic" wine - it might change the flavour a bit but does that really matter ??? As once it's filtered etc it'll just be put away to age (forgotten about ;-D ).......

Damn! I don't know, I just can't make my mind up what to do next.......

I just want to do something, because then I can start again, and hopefully try and be considerably more organised than I have been up to now..........

1 comment:

Aristaeus said...

It's all good Fatbloke, I'm making more fruit melomels these days. The market fruit is plentiful, but honey has gone up.