Mead racking time

The mead stopped bubbling a week ago, so after giving it sufficient time to settle, I racked it yesterday. Right away things became challenging. My small, 1.5 gallon fermentation vessel had vanished. Poof. Not in my office, not in the boxes with my other homebrew stuff, nowhere. I found the screw-top lid, and the tap assembly, but the vessel itself... who knows? This caused me some degree of consternation, as this was what I'd planned to use for my muscadine pyment. And my plethora of water trap airlocks seem to have vanished as well. Grr.

I racked the five gallons of mead into my 2.5 gallon vessel along with two 1 gallon glass carboys, cleaned the sediments out of the big 6-gallon fermenter, then returned the mead to it. I then got the muscadines (which had been thawing for the past couple of hours) and pounded them into a pretty convincing pulp with a potato masher. I added this to the now-empty 2.5 gallon fermenter (after sampling a taste of the juice. Mmmm... nutty, sweet muscadine) then drained 1.5 gallons of the racked mead from the big vessel onto the muscadines. Then I added a half teaspoon of pectic enzyme and closed it up. I sealed it with a jury-rigged water trap using pieces I scrounged out of my homebrew boxes. It ain't pretty, but it works.

The muscadines safely taken care of, I turned my attention to the remaining mead. For the bulk of the mead, I'd decided to try my hand at cyser, which is a mead/apple cider confection. I added one gallon of HEB Central Market organic cider to the mead, then on top of that threw in five Granny Smith apples, chopped up. Then I added an appropriate dose of pectic enzyme and closed the fermentation vessel up.

Only here's the thing: The small tank with the muscadines is fermenting. Not aggressively, but the water trap is bubbling at regular intervals. The apples ain't doing squat. There should be enough residual yeast in there to go nuts with all that appley goodness, but they're not. I washed off the Granny Smiths, so there shouldn't be any chemicals on them to retard the yeast, and the organic cider is merely pasteurized and is supposed to be sans preservatives. This is, obviously, problematic. There's enough existing alcohol in the mead to ward off any immediate bacteriological infection (ie rot the mead) but I suspect I may need to add a second dose of yeast if this doesn't correct itself sooner rather than later.

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