Yesterdays job......

A week or so ago, I'd been looking through my meads etc to see what needed doing next.

I was mainly prompted by a gallon of heather honey mead that'd I'd made last year, had cleared, then back sweetened - on back sweetening, the damn thing developed another haze. I asked around the forums and the best suggestion seemed to be that it should drop out with age.

11 months later, it was still hazy as hell, so I asked again, the suggestion was to hit it with some finings. I had the "Kwik Clear" 2 part finings from Ritchies, but really wanted to try something a little less harsh. I've got some bentonite (one of the suggestions), but the other i.e. Sparkoloid, isn't available here in the UK.

The long and short of it was that I just got impatient and used the Kwik Clear. It worked a treat, but seemed to produce a considerable layer of "fluffy" sediment.

So what to do....... Well......

 

seemed like the way ahead. I deliberately chose the coarse, "number 1" filters. as you can see from the picture, I was just  setting up the plate filter section of the minijet....

As you can see, the layer of sediment was about 3/4's of an inch deep. I don't know why, because I'd already cleared it once and the only sediment should have been from the haze caused by the back sweetening.

Anyway, there was other meads that needed to be run through the filter as well....

So it seemed highly appropriate to get the filter/pump out.......

It all seems to have gone reasonably smoothly, the only thing I'm not really sure about, is that while I was using the minijet, the mead on the intake pipe was clear for the most part, but where the small pipe comes out of the pump section and passes to the filter plates, there seemed to be a lot of very fine bubbles coming into the mead.

Now I don't know if that was a small leak that allowed some air into the mead or whether it was removing some of the dissolved carbon dioxide (CO2). The meads all passed through the filter section Ok and as you'll hopefully see from the next picture, I know have an increasing collection of meads that are bulk ageing.

Some of them are pretty close to being ready to drink, some of them have a way to go. Now I don't know which, off the top of my head, but some are dry meads, some are sweeter (I prefer mine to have a gravity of about 1.005 - or "medium").

So in the new year, I'll have to go through them again and work out what needs bottling and what can sit for a while, or as might be the case, what needs a little bit of back sweetening....... Plus I'll be able to sort out whether there's any oxidation or not.

Oh and just in case anyone who reads this thinks "he didn't mention any sulphite or campden tablets", they'd all had that the racking before - so don't forget, you would normally only add sulphite/campden tablet every other racking.

That's a poor picture of some of the meads that are bulk ageing under the stairs, but I suspect you get my point. I think there's between 12 and 15 gallons there.