Sanitised fermenter and rehydrated a sachet of Lalvin 71B in some of the bottled water. Sanitised the stick blender attachment in the jug of StarSan. Transferred about 3 litres of water to the fermenter and added the honey. Quite a bit of the wildflower honey had crstallised in the jars, and despite leaving the jars in hot water for around 30 minutes beforehand, they didn’t liquify much. I couldn’t leave that much honey in the jar obviously, so I scraped the crystallised honey into a saucepan, rinsed the jars out with some recently boiled water from the kettle and added that to the saucepan. Set it over the heat and stirred constantly, just until the honey was fully dissolved. Then I set the saucepan inside another larger pot containing ice and chilled it down. I used 1 x 900g of blended honey and 2 x 350g organic wildflower honey. On this batch I used 1/4 tsp tannin, 1/4 tsp acid blend and 1 tsp Youngs yeast nutrient. Topped up to the 5.5 litre mark. Blended with the sanitised stick blender to heavily aerate the must and pitched the rehydrated yeast. I have it fermenting pretty cool at the moment and seems to be doing okay.
29/12/2017 – I did my usual multiple rackings with this. Finally got around to doing a taste test and gravity reading. Not surprised to see it had reached 1.000. Up front, I didn’t get the same high acidity I got the last time I did this mead. There’s a slightly acetone flavour there that I’m not happy with. I’ll probably let this age for another 6-12 months and tale another sample then.
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