Racking my Brain? I Mead Too!
“Its time to rack the mead” I said to the wife last week, and after a grumbled comment she agreed to help. I think she mentioned I could do it myself until I pointed out that I could do the same when I went to drink the mead!
The point of course to racking is so that the liquid in the demijohn has a better chance of clearing and giving you a better clearer brew when you get round to bottling the drink.
So out came the box of brewing kit, the two demijohns of by now pretty still and none fermenting mead and prepared to crack on with the racking process.
After sanitizing all the kit, including the new demijohns and the syphon, I decided to take a SG reading and compare it to what the previous reading was.
I am producing two different meads this time. The first being a traditional mead made with some Spanish forest honey from Asda. The initial SG when I first made the must was 1.086, after measuring this time the SG came out to 1.006. I punched these numbers into the Brewers friend ABV calculator it came in at a very nice 10.5% ABV!
As for the Raspberry mead that has come out nearer to 12 % and I am well stoked that I appear to have two great brews on my hands.
(yes it looks like mud, this picture is from when the batch was first made!)
After testing the SG, I decided to rack both Demijohns off into another set of demijohns, and so began an hour of syphoning and getting the liquids ready for transfer. Full bottle on table, empty bottle on floor, insert tube and pump auto syphon to get liquid flowing.
After getting the liquid out with hardly any of the lees being transferred, I estimated I had lost approximately about 500ml of the mead due to the amount of lees and other floating contaminants in the liquid.
During the testing of the SG we had a taste of both of the meads, and this is what I could taste. The traditional Mead had quite a stringent flavour profile with the alcohol profile tasting very young. I am of the opinion that the longer this is kept to bottle condition the better.
The Raspberry Mead tasted a lot better there was some nice notes from the raspberries, this was made with local honey, and the flavour was more noticeable than the store bought honey. I also found the alcohol didn’t taste as young though both meads were started on the same day!
I will be testing them again in the next few days, and I will make a decision whether to bottle or do a second racking. I promise I will try and get more images.
Till next time
Toodle pip!