Copy Link
Add to Bookmark
Report
Mead Lovers Digest #0310
Subject: Mead Lover's Digest #310, 22 May 1994
From: mead-lovers-request@eklektix.com
Mead Lover's Digest #310 22 May 1994
Forum for Discussion of Mead Making and Consuming
Dick Dunn, Digest Coordinator
Contents:
citric acid, again (Dick Dunn)
Resurrecting the Dead (Doburoku Jiji)
Send ONLY articles for the digest to mead-lovers@eklektix.com.
Use mead-lovers-request@eklektix.com for subscribe, unsubscribe, and admin
requests. When subscribing, please include your name and a good address
in the message body unless you're sure your mailer generates them.
There is an FTP archive of the digest on sierra.stanford.edu in pub/mead.
If you have email access but not ftp, it will accept "listserv" requests.
Send email with message "help" to listserv@sierra.stanford.edu.
------------------------------
Subject: citric acid, again
From: rcd@raven.eklektix.com (Dick Dunn)
Date: 20 May 94 17:47:24 MDT (Fri)
MEADMSTR@aol.com wrote:
> Concerning the previous thread :
>
> As far as validity, how 'bout BS Enology ?
Sorry; didn't mean it as a credentials check!
What I was getting at, anyway, was that enough people have ended up with
enough citric acid--from one source or another--in meads which have fer-
mented OK, that it's highly unlikely Peter Voelker's lack of fermentation
was caused by it.
Whether it's a bad idea to get citric acid in a must is a somewhat differ-
ent question from whether it will kill the yeast outright. Still, as long
as the topic has been broached, there are at least a couple questions:
* If citric acid is a problem for yeast, why are people using stuff that
puts a fair bit of citric acid in the must but not seeing any obvious
problems? (Of course, the problems could be there but not be blatant,
which changes the question to what we would be looking for in more
subtle problems.) What problems occur at what concentrations?
* Again, if citric acid is a problem for yeast, why is it a component of
what is commonly called "winemaker's acid blend" in home wine/beer
supply shops? (As far as I can find out, citric is 15-20% of the
total.) Is it that the quantity used is not enough to matter, or that
it's done because the manufacturers don't know any better, or what?
> I argue the point that just because others do it, does not make it good
> practice !.
True, and we've certainly got enough techniques among meadmakers which are
unnecessary at best and counterproductive at worst--some theory would help
get a lot of us out of the dark ages.
Still, reality is trump. Anything that exists is possible, and a lot of
folks have gotten a lot of citric acid into mead musts and still fermented
them out in good time, so the question becomes one of how to apply known
science to the practice--in a simple, practical sense, what's the presence
of citric acid going to do, and at what level does it start to become a
significant problem? Your references are probably relatively inaccess-
ible to most of us--either physically unavailable or written at a level
which requires oenological background we don't have.
---
Dick Dunn rcd@eklektix.com -or- raven!rcd Boulder, Colorado USA
...Simpler is better.
------------------------------
Subject: Resurrecting the Dead
From: Doburoku Jiji <doburoku@freenet.scri.fsu.edu>
Date: Sat, 21 May 94 20:17:30 18000
Over the winter, I had what should have been a wine-strength melomel
die on me with only about 5% alcohol produced (apropos the citric acid
thread, it was done with mandarin oranges). Adding more yeast
directly to the must did nothing, so I tried a technique I found in a
wine-making book. You begin by making a small starter with fresh
yeast, water (fruit juice), nutrient, and a bit of honey or sugar.
Once it is fermenting, draw off some must until your starter is about
double in size. When you're sure that is fermenting, draw off more
must and double it again. Keep going, changing containers as
appropriate, until you have half your must drawn off into the starter
and fermenting actively. Then, dump it back into your carboy and
pray. It took me 5-6 days of this to restart my 5-gallon batch, but
it worked beautifully.
----------
Doburoku Jiji
Fujisawa, Japan
------------------------------
End of Mead Lover's Digest #310
