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Mead Lovers Digest #0597
Subject: Mead Lover's Digest #597, 26 September 1997
From: mead-request@talisman.com
Mead Lover's Digest #597 26 September 1997
Forum for Discussion of Mead Making and Consuming
Dick Dunn, Digest Janitor
Contents:
Pyment, fruit in secondary (Daniel Juliano)
Mead Grenades? (Ron Barnes) (RBarnes001@aol.com)
re: use of oak in mead making (Dan McFeeley)
New brewing Newsgroup ("Eric A. Rhude")
Re: Malo-lactic fermentation (Mark Evenson)
plastic bottles (PickleMan)
Racking from small containers (Thaddaeus A Vick)
plastic bottles (Thaddaeus A Vick)
Re: Using Persimmons (Eugene Foss)
making starters for mead yeast? (j&a)
NOTE: Digest only appears when there is enough material to send one.
Send ONLY articles for the digest to mead@talisman.com.
Use mead-request@talisman.com for [un]subscribe/admin requests. When
subscribing, please include name and email address in body of message.
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----------------------------------------------------------------------
Subject: Pyment, fruit in secondary
From: Daniel Juliano <dan@starfire.ne.uiuc.edu>
Date: Thu, 25 Sep 1997 01:19:41 -0500 (CDT)
I have 5 gallons of year-old mead in a carboy, ready to be bottled
or augmented with fruit/spices/etc. I'm trying to decide what to do
with it. I'd really like to make a pyment. I've heard that using
plain old Welch's grape juice concentrate makes a good pyment, but
am skeptical. Any comments?
I put some blueberries in 3 gallons of another year-old mead I had
(40 oz, frozen, Columbo brand), let it sit a month, and bottled the
product. YUM. It is a beautiful scarlet color, clear, with a
delicious blueberry flavor and aroma. It also has an interesting
finish and aftertaste, tasting somewhat bready. We (my homebrew
club) decided it was due to the blueberry skins. Before doing this
I posted on rec.crafts.brewing asking if people ever put fruit into
the secondary and got a postive response. Now I'm wondering why
anyone would put the fruit in the primary. You can get a fresher
fruit flavor by putting the fruit in the secondary. It hasn't
been sitting around as long by the time you drink it, and the
aroma doesn't blow off like it would in the primary. Any comments?
While I'm posting, I have to mention that our homebrew club just
bought seven 5-gallon buckets of honey for $60 each from the
University of Illinois Bee Lab. The honey is only lightly filtered
(to remove bee parts & wax), neutral tasting (last year's was more
floral), and light.
- --
Daniel Juliano | Champaign-Urbana
dan@starfire.ne.uiuc.edu | Illinois, USA
------------------------------
Subject: Mead Grenades? (Ron Barnes)
From: RBarnes001@aol.com
Date: Thu, 25 Sep 1997 07:14:06 -0400 (EDT)
In a message dated 97-09-25 02:21:02 EDT, you write:
> And when they grenade they don't perforate your house in the manner
> of a sealed glass bottle.
> Dick
> ddawson@syr.edu
What kind of mead would do that? I've been doing mead for years and have
never had a bottle explode! Though one time, a commercial mead did blow it's
cork on me.
Poor me, had to drink the entire bottle that night 'cuz I couldn't cork it!
Ron
RBarnes@aol.com
------------------------------
Subject: re: use of oak in mead making
From: Dan McFeeley <mcfeeley@keynet.net>
Date: Thu, 25 Sep 1997 11:17:04 -0500
"Glenn Mountain" <wally@labyrinth.net.au> wrote:
> Just wondering if anyone has any experience in using oak barrels to either
> ferment or age their mead in as in wine making ?
> If so, is new or old oak preferred or is it just a matter of personal
> taste?
I don't know much about this personally since an apartment doesn't offer
the room needed for a much coveted wine cellar -- I'm pretty limited to
corner space for glass carboys and such.
Roger Morse (_Making Mead_ Wicwas Press 1980) comments that at one time,
most wine was fermented and aged in wooden casks. White Oak was the
wood of choice, but others such as Redwood were sometimes used. Home
winemakes would often used whiskey barrels from which some of the
oak flavor had already been extracted. As Dick Dunn has already pointed
out, new barrels have to be used cautiously since the mead will pick up a
lot of the oak flavor from the new wood.
In _Comprehensive Winemaking_, Duncun & Acton suggest conditioning a
new barrel (after it has been sanitized) by filling it with some
"nondescript but sound wine" with a little added citric acid and tannin,
about one bottle of wine with a teaspoon of citric acid and a large
pinch of tannin per 22.5 liters. Add to the barrel, seal, and roll it
in the barrel vigorously for 1/2 to 1 hour. Pour out the wine and add
the fermenting must within an hour.
Barrel size is important because of the changing ratio of surface area
to volume. What this basically means is that small barrel from 5 to 25
gallons can absorb oxygen too fast in comparision to the larger barrels
(wood is semi-permeable so it allows a certain amount of air seepage
and evaporation). Morse states that mead stored in small barrels for
long periods of time will have an overoxidized taste. The folks at
Presque Isle Wine Cellars also advise caution with small barrel sizes,
saying that although they are cheaper (30 gallon barrels go for $169.50),
they require more careful handling and the evaporation losses can be
substantial. They suggest using oak chips for batches smaller than 20
gallons to get better oak flavor in the wine. A minimum size might
be 3 gallons, according to Duncun & Acton (_Comprehensive Winemaking_)
but even these should be used for sherries and similar oxidized wines.
Four 1/2 to six gallons are better, but still not quite satisfactory.
They feel that 9-16 gallon casks are best for most home winemaking.
Brother Adam of Buckfast Abbey would have nothing less than mead aged in
wood. In the reprint of his article on mead from Bee World, he states
that mead cannot be matured to perfection in small quantities, nor aged
in glass, plastic, or stoneware. The best barrels are used wine casks, he
says, and especially casks that have held sherry if you can get them.
After the primary fermentation has ceased, the mead should be aged in the
cask for a minimum of two years on the lees, sometimes for as long as seven
years. The long aging might have been necessary when heather honey,
available in England where Buckfast Abbey is located, was used in Brother
Adam's mead. According to Duncun & Acton, heather honey is a full
flavored honey that creates an unbalanced taste in mead unless it is aged
for 8 years. Morse says he disagrees with Brother Adam's methods and can
present good counter-arguments, but he can't disagree with the quality
of his mead, which was outstanding.
As barrels are used and reused, year after year, they gradually lose the
effect of imparting flavor to the mead from the leaching out of essential
tannin and other components in the wood. The wood also takes on
characteristics of the mead it is used to store, so the long term result
is a gradual swapping of the character of wood and wine. Morse reccomends
for this reason that the same type of mead should be reserved for the
specific barrels it has been made in over time. In other words, a barrel
used for dry meads should not be called up to sevice a melomel.
It seems that no matter how hard you try to get mead making down to a
science, the subjective factor that makes it an art with a long tradition
always sneaks up and spoils our best quantitative efforts. It's probably
why we have divided opinions at times as to what are the best ways to
practice our craft. The addition of nutrient, honey, water, and yeast to
a 4 liter bottle seems pretty simple and basically cut and dried wine
making technique, but from what I read about the proper use of barrels,
the best meads might need something of the intuitive sense of the artist.
On the other hand, I've gotten good reactions from my little meadery
tucked away in a corner of our home apartment. Who's to say?
All of the above is a collection from some gathered sources I have.
Comments and criticism are more than welcome.
__________
________
Dan McFeeley
mcfeeley@keynet.net
------------------------------
Subject: New brewing Newsgroup
From: "Eric A. Rhude" <ateno@panix.com>
Date: Thu, 25 Sep 1997 12:56:06 -0400 (EDT)
net.crafts.zymurgy.general
It is available to
those of you who have a Usenet II
news feed. Ask your provider if you
done know.
What this means is that it is spam free.
Eric Rhude
------------------------------
Subject: Re: Malo-lactic fermentation
From: Mark Evenson <wine-hop@dnvr.uswest.net>
Date: Thu, 25 Sep 1997 11:21:22 -0700
I've never had a mead spontaneously start a malo-lactic fermentation.
Just for the record, I generally do not sulfite or pasteurize my must;
however, I do pitch an awful lot of yeast! (About 5 grams/gallon on
dried cultures.) I have used the Wyeast malo-lactic cultures on meads,
ciders and wines. In general, the product may smooth out sooner, but
you can have "off" aromas while it is young (reference Modern
Winemaking by Philip Jackisch for more info). I've noticed a reduction
in the fresh fruit flavor and aroma as well. Recent experiment was 6
gallon batch of peach mead, one primary fermenter, then racked to two
3 gallon carboys for secondary. Malo-lactic culture was introduced to
one carboy. It's relatively young (2 years) so I'm only just now
sending it out for competition. Informal evaluations to date follow my
own observations as given above. If anyone's interested, I'll let you
know the judges comments.
Hope this was helpful. It's the first time I've jumped into dialogue on
MLD.
Anne T.
------------------------------
Subject: plastic bottles
From: PickleMan <wrp2@axe.humboldt.edu>
Date: Thu, 25 Sep 1997 16:38:15 -0700 (PDT)
I'd be extra careful with using 2L bottles. The small volume means a lot
of surface area and and increased risk of infection. I have only gotten
infections in my one-gallon test batches, but at least 5/6 of them are
okay. You're better off using a gallon glass jug or a 4L wine jug for a
small fermenter. (and they are free at most recycling centers).
Warren Place
wrp2@axe.humboldt.edu
------------------------------
Subject: Racking from small containers
From: barefoothugh@juno.com (Thaddaeus A Vick)
Date: Thu, 25 Sep 1997 21:14:12 -0400
>One note, with the small volume, you may have a hard time racking to a
>secondary container to get off the spent yeast. I often test recipes with
>1-gal batches, and it is hard to rack 1-gal batches without oxidizing
>during transfer or adding so much additional water in the racking hoses
>that you wind up watering down the mead.
I've racked from one gallon glass jug to another with no trouble, and
also used the same siphoning process when I bottled. Simply fill the hose
with water and slip one end into the mead with your thumb over the other end.
It will drip a bit as you put it in, but once the end of the hose is submerged
no more water comes out. Let your thumb off a bit and run the water out into
the sink until the mead gets down to the end of the hose, then slip it into
the empty container and let it run. Simpler to do than to explain.
- ----------------------------------------------
Thaddaeus A. Vick
dvick@crl.com --or-- BarefootHugh@juno.com
http://www.crl.com/~dvick
------------------------------
Subject: plastic bottles
From: barefoothugh@juno.com (Thaddaeus A Vick)
Date: Thu, 25 Sep 1997 21:10:03 -0400
>> I am new to making mead & was wondering if 2
>> liter pop bottles works well for fermenting.
>> I was wondering because I don't have the space
>> to make large batches & 2 liters would be the
>> right size for storing away while waiting for
>> the fermenting to finish.
>
>Unfortunately, mead requires enough aging time that you might get
>into oxidation problems, due to the fact that the PET bottles are
>oxygen permeable. Glass is a better solution. Try some gallon juice
>jugs for fermenting, good size for small batches. You will need to
>bottle, but 12 oz. bottles don't take up much space and are cheap.
>Small bottles also let you stretch the mead out when you start to
>drink it.
But if you are going to cap them instead of corking them (an obvious and
simple choice if using 12 oz. bottles), make sure you get the right kind of
caps. Not all crown caps are oxygen-proof, so you will need to make sure
the ones you get are.
- ----------------------------------------------
Thaddaeus A. Vick
dvick@crl.com --or-- BarefootHugh@juno.com
http://www.crl.com/~dvick
------------------------------
Subject: Re: Using Persimmons
From: foss@uiuc.edu (Eugene Foss)
Date: Thu, 25 Sep 1997 21:24:10 -0500
>> They
>> contain numerous pits each. My question (and it is a longshot that
>> anyone will know) is if there is anything harmful in the pits that should
>> prevent me from adding them to a mead or lambic?
>
>Get a colander or
>strainer, and with the back of a spoon, smush the persimmons thru.
>You'll get all the pulp, none of the seeds, and lose a good deal of the
>skin.
I've got a persimmon mead sitting in a carboy right now. I strained out a
few of the pits, but I wasn't able to squeeze the pulp through my colander
very well, so I put them into the primary. I haven't had very much of it,
just tastes, but I haven't experienced any problems as a result of the
seeds.
At first the mead was a little bitter, but I think the bitterness comes
from the skins rather than the seeds (so I recommend removing the skins).
This brings me to another note on persimmon mead...I don't recommend
letting it get completely dry. The bitterness comes through a little, and
is much better balanced with a little extra sweetness.
So I added some extra honey to the mead, and this additonal fermentation is
taking a really long time. I'm not in any hurry; I'll just wait until the
SG stabilizes.
I also had another problem with my persimmon mead. The fruit pulp never
settled out very well. About a quarter of the mead was this semi-floating
pulp. I ended up racking just the clear part off, and it was very hard for
me to throw out the rest of the mead, despite the fact that it was mixed
inseperately with this floating pulp.
Incidentally, are we all talking about American persimmons? They're
smaller and more flavorful than the oriental persimmons you can buy in the
supermarket.
------------------------------
Subject: making starters for mead yeast?
From: j&a <mrpookey@mindspring.com>
Date: Fri, 26 Sep 1997 09:27:37 -0500
hey now,
i'm making my first batch of mead soon and was going to use wyeast sweet
mead liquid yeast. is it good practice to make a starter for mead? i do for
beer so i would figure that would go for mead as well? if so, should i
still use malt? or should i use honey?
thanks,
jonathan
*****************************************************************************
Willow sky, whoa, I walk and wonder why.
They say love your brother, but you will catch it when you try.
Roll down the line, boy, drop you for a loss;
Ride you out on a cold rail road and nail you to a cross.
- --Unbroken Chain by Robert Petersen
*****************************************************************************
------------------------------
End of Mead Lover's Digest #597
*******************************
