Thursday, April 26, 2012

Banana Mead Part 4

Ok, last night, when I checked the brew, there was plenty of foam showing, but the gravity test showed little, if any movement.

Tonight when I checked it, I could see not only plenty of foam but some yeast scum on the top of the inside of the fermenter, so I was happy that it was fermenting fine, and my concerns of the previous posts on this where unfounded, just that I suspect I'm correct in thinking that I should have left the must in a bucket for a day or two more to dissipate the sulphites more.

Either way, it's going well.

Both last night, and tonight, I've stirred the hell out of it and managed to generate foam eruptions twice. When I checked the gravity tonight, it was down to 1.070 - which is only 10 points from the 1/3rd sugar break, so I took about 750mls out of the fermenter and put it into the liquidiser once I'd sanitised it and ran it on slow to aerate the contents. At the same time I stirred the fermenter as well, to help remove some of the built up CO2. Once that was done (about 5 minutes of "aeration"), I thought "sod it" it's gonna steam past the 1/3rd break over night (probably), so I added 1 and 1/2 teaspoons of FermaidK and 3/4's teaspoon of DAP (di-ammonium phosphate) and stirred that in well, before pouring the 750mls of well aerated must back into the fermenter.

I'm gonna leave it for now.

Just for info, the ferment was well underway, until I stirred the hell out of it. If you look at "Machalel's" (he's ? - a newer member over at gotmead) video clip, that's about the same level of activity I was getting, just that my batch didn't look quite as impressive as my fermenter is a 3 US gallon water cooler bottle (I'll try and post a pic another time) coloured transparent blue, and my must is lighter in colour as his batch was "caramel banana", mine is just banana.

Right, that's it for now. TTFN

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