Hello guys, I have gotten into mead making recently because it seemed a nice way to make Christmas gifts for people and I'm rather enjoying it so intend to continue as a hobby. The first batch went surprisingly well despite being ignorant of a few basic steps such as secondary fermentation and pasteurising the mead. I made and Apple Mead and a Cherry Mead and my first questions is why do people use actual fruit pieces when they add flavours? I have a farmers market near my work and bought high quality Apple and Cherry juices and simply used these almost as a replacement for water in the initial fermentation. Using juice seemed like the logical and obvious way to do this and I have since used Lemon juice in another Mead, why would I instead put things like Lemon peel or fruit pieces in and usually on the second fermentation? Many folks seem to do this and I'm wondering if there are advantages to that?
Next a sort of mini rant/question, my first brew went well but I didn't understand how the hydrometer worked and bought one after I had begun thus missing the opportunity to take an original SG reading. Because of this the Meads ABV is going to remain a mystery despite it being delicious, no biggie ill do better on the next one I thought. The second time around I have carefully taken my gravity/temp readings and have just racked two of the three batches into an attempted secondary fermentation vessel, I had frozen small batches of the original mixture to use for backsweetening which I added after I took a second SG/temp reading and intend to do a third reading in a few weeks. When it came to calculating my ABV I input my data into an online calculator and the result was waaay lower than I expected (About 13.65%) but there was an option for an "Alternative calculation" which was almost exactly what I expect (17.38%). The large difference has totally baffled me and after googling and watching videos of people talking about it I have become very confused about how vague and imprecise the whole process is and I feel like its impossible to actually know the answer if various formulas give such dramatically different results. What annoys me about the confusion on this issue is the fact that industry professionals can use a process called "Gas Chromatography" to find the exact ABV of a sample so why has no one done this and worked out definitively which formulas give the most accurate results.
I am assuming that because I have backsweetened with a frozen sample of the original mixture that was fermented this will have no impact on my SG readings accuracy with regards to ABV%, is this assumption sound?
I intend to age my Mead in its 5l (just over 1 gallon for you Yanks) Demijohn with a cork stopper on top for about 1 year, is this wise? Will the cork stopper keep it from spoiling for a year?
Finally a dumb question that is bothering me. Why does Wine go off in less than a week when you open the cork, I know this is oxidisation but the product is exposed to the air multiple times in its production including when bottled and originally corked so why does it suddenly decay when the end user briefly opens it? When I think about aging and bottling my Mead this question keeps niggling at me.
Thanks for your time!
Kemsley.
Next a sort of mini rant/question, my first brew went well but I didn't understand how the hydrometer worked and bought one after I had begun thus missing the opportunity to take an original SG reading. Because of this the Meads ABV is going to remain a mystery despite it being delicious, no biggie ill do better on the next one I thought. The second time around I have carefully taken my gravity/temp readings and have just racked two of the three batches into an attempted secondary fermentation vessel, I had frozen small batches of the original mixture to use for backsweetening which I added after I took a second SG/temp reading and intend to do a third reading in a few weeks. When it came to calculating my ABV I input my data into an online calculator and the result was waaay lower than I expected (About 13.65%) but there was an option for an "Alternative calculation" which was almost exactly what I expect (17.38%). The large difference has totally baffled me and after googling and watching videos of people talking about it I have become very confused about how vague and imprecise the whole process is and I feel like its impossible to actually know the answer if various formulas give such dramatically different results. What annoys me about the confusion on this issue is the fact that industry professionals can use a process called "Gas Chromatography" to find the exact ABV of a sample so why has no one done this and worked out definitively which formulas give the most accurate results.
I am assuming that because I have backsweetened with a frozen sample of the original mixture that was fermented this will have no impact on my SG readings accuracy with regards to ABV%, is this assumption sound?
I intend to age my Mead in its 5l (just over 1 gallon for you Yanks) Demijohn with a cork stopper on top for about 1 year, is this wise? Will the cork stopper keep it from spoiling for a year?
Finally a dumb question that is bothering me. Why does Wine go off in less than a week when you open the cork, I know this is oxidisation but the product is exposed to the air multiple times in its production including when bottled and originally corked so why does it suddenly decay when the end user briefly opens it? When I think about aging and bottling my Mead this question keeps niggling at me.
Thanks for your time!
Kemsley.