Bottled the Blueberry

On Tuesday (July 25) I finally bottled the blueberry mead (No. 13) for the Canadian Sasquatch competition. I got 24 12 oz. bottles from it, along with one 375 ml bottle (and a glass or two to drink while I was bottling). I think I screwed myself out of another 375 ml bottle because of the way I had originally racked it.

With about a half gallon left over between the two secondaries, I had combined them into one carboy and waited for the sediment to fall out again and figured I'd be able to bottle that as well. I'm not quite sure what happened, but while the sediment did settle to the bottom, it seems the remaining liquid separated too. There was a good 2 in. which layer of a very dark liquid under which was a rather light colored liquid that was about an inch or so thick. When I attempted to bottle it, the stuff coming through the racking cane was all very cloudy and rather than wrestle with it any further I discarded it.

In the future, when I'm going to rack into a secondary, it's all going to go into a single bucket.

Even so, I think the blueberry tastes very good. It's sweet, without being cloying, and it has the requisite taste of blueberry from the extract. I'm quite pleased with it since it was my real first attempt at backsweetening and adding extracts. I'm not sure what the ABV of it is though I suspect it's around 14% or so. I'm going to reach out to Canadian Sasquatch to see if he can help determine ABV after backsweetening.

Okay, I looked it up online and I'm going to try to figure it out here:

ABV, of course, stands for alcohol by volume. At the end before bottling, I had 2-1/2 gallons. SG was 1.108, FG was 0.998.

SG - FG = X * 135, or 1.108 - 0.998 = 0.11 * 135, or 14.85% ABV

The backsweetening raised the gravity to 1.002, but since there was no more fermenting it didn't increase the alcohol content. But it did increase the volume. So that's what I need to solve for.

There are 128 ounces in 1 gallon, so at 2-1/2 gallons I had 320 ounces. I added 12 oz of honey and 2 oz of extract, giving me 334 ounces total. There are two ways to figure it, basically doing the same thing.

Ex. 1:
Original Volume * Final ABV / New Volume (after backsweetening) = New ABV

320 oz * 14.85 ABV / 334 oz = 14.2% ABV

Ex. 2:
Original Volume / New Volume = X * Final ABV = New ABV

320 oz / 334 oz = 0.958 * 14.85% ABV = 14.2% ABV

Preparing to Bottle the Blueberry Mead

I racked the blueberry mead (No. 13) off of the bentonite into a 2-1/2 gallon glass jar I picked up from Wal-Mart for about $12. The lid is metal and needs to be modified or replaced, but for my purposes today it was fine as a vessel to hold the mead for bottling.

There was actually about 375 ml more than 2-1/2 gallons between the 1 gallon carboy and 2 gallon pail I had racked the mead into when I added the bentonite, so I combined the two leftovers into a one gallon carboy and will let it settle out again and then bottle into a 375 ml bottle. It will be drier than the 2-1/2 gallon batch because I flavored and backsweetened the larger batch, but it still tasted good.

Without sweetening, while the mead was dry, it did have a pleasant berry taste, but muted. So I backsweetened it with 12 oz of honey and 2 oz of natural blueberry flavoring and though it raised the mead to 1.002, and I thought it tasted great.

I'm going to let it sit for a day just to make sure fermentation doesn't restart, and it shouldn't since I had added the campden tablets, but just to make certain and then tomorrow I'll bottle.

Hard Apple Cider!

I'm attempting to make hard apple cider for the first time. If all the YouTube videos on it are any indication, it's a super easy alcohol to make, and it makes you wonder why brewers like Angry Orchard and Woodchuck charge so much. Sure, it's the time involved, but apple juice and yeast essentially ain't that difficult.

Anyway I mixed up a 1.5 quart batch to test using a recipe I found on Unemployed Redneck Hillbilly's YouTube channel. Although he's anything but those descriptors, he does seem like he knows what he's doing with so many things so I'm willing to trust him.

I saw a few other recipes, but instead of complicating things as I always seem to do, I'm going to follow his directions and see how it turns out.

No. 14 - Hard Apple Cider

1 1.6 qt. bottle Martinelli's Unprocessed Apple juice
1 pkg Red Star Premiere Blanc yeast
1/4 lb. light brown sugar
1/2 lb. white granulated sugar

I made the yeast starter according to the directions, heating up a bit of apple juice to between 95-100 degrees Fahrenheit and let stand for 15 minutes. I had wanted to use just half the pouch, but I ended up using the whole thing. I imagine it won't hurt things and may get it to ferment down quicker. I should also mention Unemployed Redneck Hillbilly (URH) used Premier Cuvee yeast in his, and though I thought I had some I didn't so I went with the Premier Blanc.

While that was percolating, I poured out about 3/4 of a cup of ice into a bowl and mixed in the two sugars. I stirred them until they were completely dissolved into the juice then poured the mix back into the bottle and shook vigorously.

URH was making 6 gallon batches and he used 2 lbs. light brown sugar and 4 lbs. of white granulated sugar in an attempt to achieve about 15% ABV. I simply reduced the calculations to approximately the amount of juice I had, and when I took my hydrometer reading the starting gravity was 1.062 or approximately 15% ABV, so it was perfect.

I poured off about 1/4 cup of juice to allow for some headroom and then added the yeast starter to the bottle. I gently mixed the yeast throughout, added a balloon as an airlock, and stored it in the basement.

I'll let it sit for 2 weeks then I'll rack it to a secondary to ferment for some 2-5 months.

Mead Updates

I've been stirring daily the two meads that I added the bentonite to and I can tell they're really clearing up. The blueberry melomel, even though it is very dark, when I hold it up to a light I can see through it. And when I stir it up again it becomes opaque.

I'm going to siphon the mead off the bentonite and attempt to backsweeten it with pure blueberry juice, then allow it to age for another month and a half before bottling. The melomel entry has to be submitted by Sept. 1 and Canadian Sasquatch has to receive like 20 bottles by October 1. I want them to be tasty by the time he gets it.

The cyser is very clear and smells delicious. I also see no hint of the pellicle forming again, although admittedly it is only a day I'm letting it stand. Still, I'm hopeful the campden tablets have killed off the wild strains.

More Racking

I continued to get up to speed on the racking of my meads that I've neglected. Yesterday I racked over my cyser (Mead No. 8) and the 3 gallons of my blueberry melomel that I hope to enter into Canadian Sasquatch's mead contest (Mead No. 13). Both were different than I expected.

Mead No. 8

This is the cyser that had the pellicle on it, or the wild strain of yeast, and I may have racked it once before because it seemed a little less than before. I'm not certain but I may have tried to use bentonite before because there was a sediment on the bottom of the bucket that seemed like clay but I don't recall having done so and my notes don't say anything about it. It also didn't seem to be particularly clear.

It smelled pretty good, however, very apple-y, though its taste wasn't quite what I was hoping for. Very dry, still a bit harsh. I added 1 tsp. of bentonite to the 2-1/2 gal. because the packaging wasn't very clear as to how much. It says 4 tsp. in 1-1/3 cup warm water "sufficient for 5 gallons" but elsewhere on other packages it says 2 tsp in 1/2 cup "sufficient for 5 gallons." The consensus on the Internet is it's the latter that's appropriate so I added the 1 tsp.

I also added 2 Campden tablets to it to try to kill the yeast and to allow me to backsweeten the mead. Perhaps I should have waited till after I was done with the clarification first, because I have to stir up the mead for the next couple of days, but the pellicle has me stressed and I want to be rid of it.

Mead No. 13

This didn't have a pungent aroma, but it had a very prominent blueberry taste, though it was still a bit more harsh than I would have liked or expected after so many months. I racked it to a 1-gal. jug and a 2-gal. bucket and also added bentonite and Campden tablets (3) to clarify and prevent any refermentation as I want to sweeten it up a bit.

The bentonite does seem to be working as I checked on the meads about 12 hours later and they seemed to have clarified a bit, the cyser more so than the blueberry, but both were clearer than they had been. There was also no sign of the pellicle on the cyser either, but that does take time to form so we'll see if the Campden tablets did their job.

I'll continue stirring the meads once or twice daily for about a week to allow the bentonite to swell sufficiently and strip out as much sediment as possible. Then I'll rack them over once more and allow them to finish aging before bottling.

A Little Hiatus and a Mead Update

I think I got overwhelmed by my mead making activities last year. The once-a-week mead, while not particularly difficult to achieve, taxed me a bit on storage and keeping track of what was what. And then when my cyzer got an apparent bacterial infection, I got disappointed. While I made a few more batches after that, the ardor that had been fueling my mead-making dissipated.

In the months since, I understand a lot more of what I was originally reading. It wasn't so much an infection, but rather the presence of wild yeast -- most likely Brettanomyces -- and I'd imagine it was because I didn't wash my apples nearly good enough while making the cyber. It's definitely not a killer for the mead, but it's something I'll need to control for and prevent in the future.

After some 9 months though, I accidentally stumbled across Michael Jordan's YouTube channel (no, not that Michael Jordan!). He had posted a link to one of his videos on the Got Mead? Facebook group page and I immediately liked his simple style of mead making. No fancy equipment, no complex formulas for nutrient additions. Heck, it seems he's drinking many of his meads after just a couple of months. In one video in particular, he says he basically just cold-crashes his meads and drinks them.

While I imagine some of those meads likely taste a little "hot" because they're still so young, and I'd probably age mine much longer to mellow the alcohol, there was a lot to learn from him. He's producing a series called "52 Meads in a Year" -- hmmm, where have I heard that before? -- and his videos provide step-by-step instructions on how he's making them. At the end, he plans on producing a book with all the recipes and more information. It's really an entertaining effort and I'm hooked.

Between him and making a dandelion wine, I got back into mead making. I was looking at my yard of dandelion flowers and wonder what, if anything could be done with them, and found you could make wine with them. So I whipped up a batch, and after the primary fermentation was finished I racked it to a secondary and took a sample and -- oh my gosh! -- it was good! Still young of course, after only 5 weeks, but surprisingly tasty. Now I'm going to let it age in the secondary till around Christmas, which is seemingly the traditional time to crack open the wine.

To be honest, though, I all but abandoned my meads. Other than drinking a few of my very first meads -- one in particular earned rave reviews from my friends who were not quite sure what to expect, and if you knew these guys you'd realize any praise is a superlative -- I basically ignored my meads. While it's probably not a terrible thing that I just let them sit there undisturbed, a few should have been racked off their lees a long time ago, and I'm finally getting around to doing that.

I've also bought the ingredients necessary to make more mead again. One I'm going to try is a simple hard cider recipe that I got from Michael Jordan. It's essentially just apple juice and yeast. Other recipes I've seen on YouTube call for adding sugar, but Michael, as I said, takes a more simple approach to many things. Another video I saw on hard cider also use used juice and yeast (well, and a bunch of different additives like wine tannin and the like), but then he back sweetened it afterwards with brown sugar and cinnamon. I may do something like that.

But in the main I think I'm going to follow Michael Jordan's 52 meads in a year recipes, following his video progression one by one, and see how they turn out. If nothing else, it gets me back into making mead.

With that, though, let's update on how my meads are progressing. "Mead," actually. I've only just begun racking the ones I have standing around, so I did just one. In the days ahead I'll be doing all the others.

Mead No. 4

This was an experimental mead that I used dehydrated orange slices in. I'll admit this had a very tiny amount of a film on top, and while I initially thought it may have been "contaminated" in some way by my cyzer, I think in reality it probably was from the oranges I used. The film's limited presence suggests the dehydration process may have killed most, but not all of the wild yeast. So once again, I'll only be using extremely well-washed fruit in the future.

I tasted it, and as before there's still a somewhat hard alcohol taste to it, much as there was when I initially racked it, and this one may require a lot of time. What I'm thinking of doing is adding potassium metabisulphite to it to kill any yeasts that may still be present, and then back sweetening it. It wasn't horrible, more like a very dry wine, and it's lost all the orange-y taste it had, so perhaps I can salve it by sweetening it.