Home Distiller

So, here i am making mead. I get it bottled up and all is well, ferment is rolling.
Now The recipe calls to add half the nutrients after it has stabalized for a day. so i take off the bung and dump a teaspeeon of yeast nuts in... instantly its boiling over So As instinct would have it it Plug it back up with the ferment lock and bung.. Mead is spewing everywhere. I take it back off and hear this **BOOM** as HOney wine squirts all over the place. This went on for A LONG 15 seconds before it settled down. oh my god they should warn you about crap like that .....

What recipie were your using and how full was your container? Just wondering 'cause I intend to start making mead soon (finally tracked down a place I can ferment, still working on a place to set up a still, I'll have that in a few days I hope) and I definately don't want to unintentionaly do that myself.

Whenever a fermentation happens (even in an open container) X amount of CO2 goes into solution based on the temp of the liquid. The colder the temp the more CO2 goes into solution.

This is just a guess, but I believe ya had yer mead fermentin' pretty cool and alot of gas built up in yer mead. I'll also guess the yeast nutrients you were usin' were salt crystals. When ya dumped in the crystals ya provided a crap-load of sharp corners for the CO2 to bubble out from.

Basically ya got a mead volcano caused by the sudden release of the trapped CO2.

Yup... exccatly that, I guess i should have mixed the yeast into a slurry (mixing it with water first) prior to dumping it in.. Live and learn baby..

My recipie was

14 lbs honey,
5 gallons (or there abouts) of water
5 tsp of DAP
5 tsp Yeast nutrients

Step by step
put 2 packets of Lavlin 1118-C yeast into a 1/2 cup water in a jar and shook it up hehe
Then take the lid off and let it sit until you need it.

Then
put 2 gallons water into boiler(pot)
put my wort chiller in the pot.(to sanitize)
brought it to a boil.
shut off heat.
added honey and stired the crap out of it.
turned the water on to my wort chiller
brought my wort/wash/mash/must/ whatever you wanna call it down to 85degree's temp.
Drained it into a glass carboy
Then i added in my DAP and 1/2 of my yeast nutrients shook it up really good.
then added in my yeast, Shoook it up again
put a ferment lock on it... and Let it sit for a day.
Then i added the other half of my yeast nuiets... (see post heheh)
and here i am today.. and its fermentin like a Freight train.

I'm going to try mead today been giving local bucther samples I went in today to buy honet 10 lbs he said just take it and keep bringing by samples so that made me feel good.

racked up mead today along with pumpkin mead is with apple it taste great wish I could say the same for the pumpkin.

I tried making a batch of mead last year and added a tablespoon of cinnamon later that day after all was said and done I checked on it and it was foaming madly coming up out of the airlock, I made another batch without the cinnamon and it was fine. BTW I bottled this about 3 months later and left it alone , checked it again and it had left a lot of lees in the bottles so I racked it back into fermenter with an airlock fitted and racked it again 3 months later as the lees formed. it has since cleared and looks very good as soon as I get this camera working I'll post a pic.

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Yes,I have had the volcano before,It makes one hell of a mess.I have made lots of wine,and there is a rule{that most recipes leave out}ANYTIME YOU PUT ANYTHING IN THE WINE,GO VERY VERY SLOW!
Sugar additions will do this bad too.If you start putting it in real slow,and let the wine get rid of that co2 a little at a time,you can avoid the volcano.
It happened to a friend of mine,in his kitchen,and it was a dark elderberry
wine.It went everywhare,and stained everything.He had to repaint the whole room.GO SLOW!!
WINEO

I make all my wine outside amongst the elements so it went all over the porch and fed the Bull ants for a day or two, if you check out my website link and then go to my blog I've posted a few pics of the process I use.
The honey I use is a very light one usually ie clover, yellow box ect, I tried darker honeys but they were taking at least a year to mature.

A funny story: when I went and bought it from our local apiarist he went over to his garage and opened the roller door as I was standing next to him, all of a sudden a swarm and I mean a massive swarm of bees flew out straight past my head I dropped to the ground to the sound of his pissin' himself laughin'....real funny on the bright side I got a big discount...I like a sense of humour...I'll be goin back...hehehe

Having kept bees I've made a LOT of mead some fair, some excellent - prize winning in fact - and this is the five gallon recipe from my notes. Mead has a tendency to stick during ferment and a pinch of Epsom Salts along with the Potassium Phosphate will help with this problem. These chemicals are available at any Home Brew store.
Many recipes say to boil the honey/water but this is a guaranteed way to get second class Mead. Mead also ages wonderfully and 10 year old Mead is superb!!!

15 lbs of Honey. Not too dark/rich/honeyish ( abit more than 15lbs wouldn't hurt. Make up to five gallons with water. NOT DISTILLED WATER aerated water sounds good, now that I know about aerating.

Next add some sulphite to sterilize the mash. Leave for 24 hours and add :-

20 gms Ammonium phosphate
10 gms Potassium Sulphate
5 gms Magnesium sulphate
5 VitB tablets (Barocca is great)
10 gms Tannic acid
35 gms Tartaric acid
60 gms Malic acid
20 gms Citric acid
A largish chunk of Vegemite will do no harm either


While you're doing all this of course, you are watching your starter bottle of ec1118 yeast.

It seems that I added the yeast bottle at 26c which seems a bit low to me now. I'll leave that decision to you.

Honey can be a bit temperamental and it's best to try to maintain that temperature during ferment. I used a fermentation box with a 15 watt globe and it was ideal.

I know this sounds complicated but good mead takes patience and without the chemicals the mead will be inferior because is funny stuff.

When the sg = 0.000 bottle and celler for it for 5 years. OK, so maybe try a bottle every six months

Mine always took months to ferment but had a delightful yeast nose in the finished product.

I added some nutrients to a fermenting wash once and the same thing happened to me. Luckily I was close to a sink and foamed like crazy. After researching it, when you add something solid to a solution containing some CO2 the solids act as a nucleation site and allow ALL that CO2 to foam out of the solution. To see this in action, buy a 2 liter of diet coke and some mint mentos, open the coke and dump in 5 or so mentos (in the yard obviously) and watch in spew. The best way to add new materials to a wash is to put the nutrients, etc. at the bottom of a santized carboy and siphon the wash into the carboy with the nutrients, this has always worked perfectly for me.

That's a huge amount of yeast nutrients. I don't know what went wrong but once in awhile a batch goes wild.

I've been making mead for about 15 years now and haven't had anything like that happen. I use about 15 pounds of honey, with a white labs sweet mead yeast in a 5 gallon bucket, with a small amount of citric acid and yeast nutrient ... like 1/4 teaspoon citric acid and 1/2 teaspoon of yeast nutrient and usually don't have problems.

Honey is notorious for slow fermentations or stuck fermentations. Just be sure to have a good yeast slurry to start off with and oxygenate it well.

As for the spices in the mead ... a little goes a long way.

cheers

~r~