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