Working title for this mead: Battle at the Glasshouse, in honor of the sentient cactus people of Bas Lag.

This batch used 3 lbs of raw, unfiltered cactus honey from Bennett Honey Farms in Fillmore, CA. We dissolved the honey in enough filtered tap water to make up 1 gallon, heated to > 140 F for 20 minutes, then cooled the must to 82 degrees and pitched a vigorously foaming batch of Pasteur red wine yeast in a 1-gallon carboy. Fermentation took off almost immediately, and we actually had to reopen the carboy to remove a bit of liquid, since the bubbles crept up into the airlock within an hour. Starting gravity was 1.118 on 4/16/16.

The next day, this mead is very cloudy and fermenting intensely. Our current plan is to age it on vanilla beans and oak chips in secondary fermentation.

Lessons learned so far:

  • A 1-gallon carboy can't fit a full gallon of must with a very active yeast.
  • A 1.06 oz pack of yeast is likely far more than a 1-gallon batch needs. This stuff will likely take a *long* time to clarify. I'll consider just using a half-pack of this type of yeast in the future.
comparison
Batch 002 (top) next to batch 003 during racking on 2 May 2016.

Secondary Fermentation

This batch was the most vigorous fermenter yet, no doubt due in part to the excess amounts of yeast. While it (unsurprisingly) produced tons of yeast flocculation, it remained more cloudy than the other meads. While the high yeast content probably played a role, I suspect that some of this is from the opaque, raw honey we used, which was the same color as the mead at two weeks in. In the picture below, note the differences in color and opacity between Batch 002 in the back and Patrick’s Batch 003 in the front. I don’t think this mead will clarify completely.

After two weeks, fermentation had slowed substantially, and we decided to rack it into secondary along with the others. I boiled a cup of water and soaked one ounce of medium-toast oak chips overnight, then stuffed them in a muslin bag with one split vanilla bean and racked the mead onto it in a one-gallon dark green glass carboy. Gentle fermentation resumed thereafter.

In our taste test at racking, this mead was funkier and less sweet than the other two. I suspect--hope--it will come out somewhat dry and wild tasting, especially after aging on oak chips for a week or two. Based on our hydrometer reading, this mead is now around 15% ABV.

Lessons learned

  • This mead seems to have suffered no ill effects from my enthusiastic deployment of way too much yeast. This does, however, make an unseemly mess, and we lost more mead than I would have liked to the inch+ of yeast sludge at the bottom of the carboy.
  • Cleaning yeasty krausen from an airlock after several weeks? Not that fun, not that easy. Cleaning way too much yeast from a carboy, on the other hand, is surprisingly easy. That carboy brush was an amazingly good investment.
  • Aging on wood chips should take place in a fermentation bucket only. I spent a good ten minutes stuffing the muslin bag with its scratchy, pointy contents through the narrow neck of the carboy, and I'm not positive that I'll be able to get it back out once fermentation is done. Wishlist: A one-gallon fermentation bucket for these experimental batches.