wacky1980

closed transfer is somewhat difficult with carboy / glass jug fermentation. that being said, open transfer isn't a deal-breaker. as long as you used a transfer siphon racking cane or auto-siphon, o2 exposure should be somewhat minimal. another trick to minimize o2 exposure is to purge your empty fermentation vessel with co2 prior to racking. get some 16 gram carts and a hand charger, and just shoot some co2 into the top of the jug a few minutes before racking. co2 is heavier than atmosphere, so it will settle to the bottom and "blanket" your transferred product as the jug fills.

(for beer anyways) a good addition to both back-sweeten a bit and provide significant body to the finished product is lactose. it's a bitch to mix in though, so this advice could be about 4 weeks late... ...or a few weeks early, if you go in for round 2.

just because fermentation has stopped, doesn't mean the yeast is dead. it's just eaten thru the available sugars and is now dormant. more honey could wake it back up and kick off another round of fermentation. not necessarily a bad thing, but it will continue to raise the abv until it eats thru the new sugar or until the abv is too high and the yeast can no longer survive in that environment. if adding honey is an attempt to back-sweeten, you may need to select another sweetner that won't ferment out.

.... sure, that. ok folks, it's getting closer now. we're 296 threads and 3,336 posts away from this monumental event. spaceships? nah. covid? pssh. 50k/1mil is the bit.

please don't tempt them. THIS NEEDS TO HAPPEN.

we were only 378 topics away from 50k, and only 6542 posts away from 1 million when i snapped this a few minutes ago. we need to hit both milestones with the same post. i think we're on track to hit 1mn posts in the next week or two. THIS NEEDS TO BE A PRIORITY.

look at those little fellers grow! one of my favorite plants- not just for their produce, but also because they're just a fun plant to take care of. they can grow up to 1' per day in prime growth season. i have about half a dozen hops plants in big pots this year, all established / 2nd year plants. one of them is already almost 10' tall and will top out the trellis in another week. the rest are 5' or smaller. the hope is to end up with a few pounds of wet hops to brew a big juicy ipa this fall. i haven't noticed their scent so much on the vine, but if you pick off a hop cone and crush it in your hands, the smell is amazing.

The last season or 2 were kinda fun. Like, humans unlocked all the DLC from the galaxy and were taking down the intergalactic supers left and right. Of course.

Awake since 2am. I've worked my own ass right off for the last two months straight. During shutdown, doing reno work in the bar, all by myself (with an occasional hour or 2 of help from the wife or bro-in-law). Working 80-100 hours/wk to stay on schedule. So I finally took an afternoon off. Came home at 5pm, grilled out, and then crashed before 9. Planned on taking tomorrow morning off as well, one last little break before the big reopen push starts next week. Awake since 2am. Fuck.

😬 still factory sealed?

you can use several generations of the same yeast from beer fermentation before mutations start to affect quality. i've tried it once and it worked out pretty well. i would assume the same is true with mead as it is with beer but i'm not sure.

you can harvest yeast from your environment, but there's no guarantee the yeast you pick up will be something that produces a tasty beverage. there are actually a few styles of beer that incorporate "spontaneous fermentation" through various methods. one of the most interesting, imo, is the use of a traditional coolship for fermenting lambic-style beers. a coolship is a large open vessel that serves to cool wort after boiling, and also expose it to open air overnight, which allows wild yeast and bacteria to "infect" the wort and kick off a spontaneous fermentation process. the combination of micro-organisms found seasonally in a particular valley in belgium are the most favorable for brewing lambic beers, of anywhere in the world.

i've gone both ways with yeast. fermentation seems to be more active when given nutrient during a starter, but i don't see a significant improvement in efficiency and i've not noticed a change in flavor so not sure if it's worth the effort. lately, i've just been pitching dry yeast straight into aerated wort and it's working fine.

it's got real good color. should clear up once it stops churning and bubbling. i'm excited for you.

i can't swallow raw oysters. i've tried, repeatedly, and my gag reflex kicks in and it turns into a big embarrassing moment. so raw oysters? never again.

are you letting it rest in the carboy for the full 6? if you can wiggle a wine thief through the bung (i love brewing terminology), you could draw up a little sample without exposing the rest of the batch to atmosphere. sample it at 1mo, 2mo, etc, until you're satisfied with it. if it tastes like absolute sour shit at 1mo, it's safe to say it's bad and you can dump it and start over. but if it just tastes "green" i.e. flavors are there but still out of balance, you're probably on the right path. i guess i need to disclaimer this a bit. i'm making assumptions that mead aging is similar enough to beer aging that these methods are applicable for both. if you have books to read, defer to them. online advice though, it's as reliable as you can imagine in many cases.

if you're using new gear, "visibly clean" plus a sanitization round is plenty. it's when you're using older gear that may have microscopic pits/scratches for shit to hide out, when you need to beef up your cleaning methods. if you made a reasonable effort to clean/sanitize, you'll be fine. i've brewed probably ~100 batches of beer, sometimes getting a little drunk and sloppy by the end of the brew, and still never managed to infect a batch. crap, i probably just jinxed myself.

i've gone both routes, with and without nutrient. imo, dry yeast doesn't seem to benefit in a significant way from using it. ymmv of course, and i rarely brew the same recipe with single variable changes, but i usually hit my marks and that's my big measure of yeast performance. i would assume beer isn't quite as prone to infection as mead, because hops are a natural antimicrobial. but as long as your gear was cleaned ~very thoroughly~ and you're not letting atmosphere hit your product once it enters the fermenter, infection is relatively rare. the main concern is what's being introduced on the fruit, but again, if it's cleaned up very well beforehand, you'll probably be fine.

depending on how long you're seeing active fermentation, you can probably rack to secondary off-schedule. my rule of thumb (for beer) is to wait until after primary fermentation ceases (no bubbles, liquid isn't circulating, yeast has visibly settled out) and then give the yeast a few more days to "clean up" before racking. moving to secondary gets your mead off the yeast and solids that settled out during primary, which can improve clarity and flavor. if you rack too early, you'll bring some yeast and solids to your secondary vessel that will eventually settle out, which may prompt you to want a third racking for extra clarity. i don't know about that yeast strain, but i would assume 10-14 days at a minimum before it has finished up its primary phase.

that's getting better around here, but still not great. i have to drive 45 minutes to find the two nearest breweries. but that's a lot better than a year ago, when it took upwards of 75 minutes to reach one. the licensing to become a brewery/brewpub is tedious, but not terribly complex. as soon as we have a nearby space to build a small brewing rig and processing area, it's on.

there's not a homebrew shop within 75 miles of here, so i do most of my shopping online. besides amazon, i frequent a couple sites that have decent pricing if you can wait up to a week for your equipment/supplies. morebeer.com ritebrew.com homebrewing.org

i'm not well-studied on mead methods, but it's generally similar to brewing beer once it's in the fermenter. i've had some homebrew meads that were straight out of the fermenter and they tended to be a little wild. aging beer allows the flavors to mingle and develop complexity through some natural chemical reactions over time, so i would assume the same to be true with a good aged mead. 6 months of aging sounds appropriate, and i wish you good luck on your first brew. i think i'm gonna be making some more beers very soon myself. i was just gifted 50lb of grain to brew up, and i have a few lb of hops in the freezer that are probably getting close to aging out of usefulness. and my grain mill just showed up on the truck yesterday, so i no longer have to order grains pre-milled (opens up a lot of options for ingredients, and you get a fresher-tasting product when you mill it right before dough-in). i'm keeping the next couple brews simple, single-malt pale ales with just one or two hop varieties. time to start really building knowledge on hop characteristics. also trying to read up on water chemistry, and how to get the perfect mix of ph, alkalinity, and hardness for each style. never thought i'd need to flex those chemistry muscles again, but here we are.

i found a place that sells non-gmo, raw, organic, pesticide-free african multi-floral honey for relatively cheap (made a thread about it in that other folder). it would get pricey to make mead from that stuff though. you can get a 60# bucket of domestic raw honey for <$200, which is enough to do like 20 gallons of mead. what temp are you fermenting at? iirc, mead yeast likes to eat at a little below room temp. upper-midwest basements are probably perfect for it.

i think it was some random thing on angelfire back in like 1999. don't remember what it was called.

i don't delete shit. it's never really gone anyways, so the way i see it is, why would i want to be the only one to give up access to my own shit?