Recent content by seth8530

I have 15 gallons of this mead. I went ahead and bottled 5 gallons of it. The FG appears to be 1.032. I am shooting for three volumes of CO2. If this one carbonates well, I will go ahead and bottle the other 10 gallons and get them carbonating too. The taste starts off both sweet and sour...

So, racked these guys today, FG looks to be 1.040.. However, I think that sugar is mostly unfermentatble. Or infact, not sugar at all but perhaps caramel. I did some reading, apperently, if you take simple sugars and heat them long enough they can turn to caramel which is not very fermentable...

And just to prove that it is really going.... A little messy but much better than when it was simply just sitting still.

Yeah, I am not quite sure what is going on. I heard from somewhere that even simple sugars can become unfermentable if you heat them long enough... So, I am wondering if it is possible that I created much more unfermentable sugars than I intended. I guess the story will be told if the gravity...

Well, time has made the picture a bit more clear... Bubbles are coming up like crazy from all the carboys. Looks like fermentation has restarted once again!

Holy moley of changes! I went into the fermentation room and noticed one of the funk meads necks had a ring of bubbels in it. I gave it a taste and the flavor profile is significantly different than it was yesterday. Instead of being a really hardcore barnyard flavor it is more cherry and tart...

So, knowing that thier is some intense sour component I went ahead and purchased 1 gallon of tart cherry concentrate ( from real cherries). http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001CFMGGI/?tag=skimlinks_replacement-20 I will add this to top off the head space in 1 of the carboys. If this causes re...

I was getting a bit concerned about the funk monster so I gave it 200 ppm sulfite and racked it into carboys. Gravity continued to move upward to close to 1.040. It has a kind of acidic taste not like I am used to seeing in lactic bacteria... but, not way out of touch for the style, but if it...

So, we got some major strangeness going on right now. The gravity was around 1.030 when I added the starter ( which included 1.5 gallons of water). The gravity is now 1.036-1.038 ( yes it has gone up) and the perception of sweetness has gone down, and the perception of sour has increased. It...

Looks like we are stuck at 1.028 ish again. I will buy some UV-43 ( hardcore restart yeast) and some yeast hulls ( to strip out toxins). The plan is to add the yeast hulls then rack off of them, and pitch a strong UV-43 starter. The PH is 3.5, the abv is somewhere between 13.5 and 14.5 ish...

Gravity is now down to 1.030. It is REALLY crawling now. I went and added some fermaid O to it and gave it a really good stir. Hopefully this will get this guy moving on a bit more briskly.

I went ahead and added the roughly 2 gallons of crystal 40/60 malt syrup. It brought the gravity up from 1.020 to around 1.035. Now, we hope that this guy wont ferment all the way dry.. Else, I might end up having a little more abv than I want. The tartness from the lemon and the sour cherry...

Just checked the gravity on this guy, looks like we are at 1.030. Perhaps at this rate we will hit around 1.010 this weekend and I can add the sugars and get this guy into secondary before too long.

So around 24 hours after adding the ec-1118 starter ( around 1.5 gallons in volume) we have the beginning signs of activity in the mead. Not sure how heated and happy it will get, but it is good to be seeings signs of life again.

I guess another alternative would be to raise the IBUs on it.