Recent content by Bob1016

There's a post on my blog about calculating that. Sorry for not linking it.

This is known as Joe's Ancient Orange Melomel/Mead (JAOM), and can produce a decent mead, but I find that people either like it or not (I'm one of the latter). If you would like to do it I highly suggest using bread yeast (either fliechmans or red star) because dry versions (using wine yeasts)...

I completely agree, but it is very easy to go overboard with info in the begining. In reality, it is pretty easy to make good mead, but very hard to make great mead. Sometimes we can forget the fact that we didn't start out calculating an exact nutrient regime specific to a select yeast and SG...

I am well aware of the deficiencies of honey musts, check my blog in a few days, I should have some info comparing amino acids in honey vs grapes. The nutrients I suggested yield ~200ppm YAN, which is enough for most low nutrient yeast in gravities <SG 1.150. Might you have misread and think I...

I'd found that often times dark honeys make mead that require long aging periods and acquired tastes. If you like the honey then it should be fine, but if there is any "funk" flavor, no matter how minute, understand that that flavor will be much more prominent when the sugar has been fermented...

That pH seems better, but still pretty low for a red wine. You might want to take a sample and add some potassium bicarbonate/carbonate to see if it helps just in case the acid is too high (or the pH too low) for the balance. Are you sure about that SG? Do you mean 0.994? That's more...

Re check your SG and pH. Honestly, that's fairly low for SG, and vinegar levels for the pH. What are you using to measure the pH?

How lucky you are to have jaboticaba! Where are you? I'd imagine south america (Brazil?). We have about 40 trees here in south florida. I've only made the wine twice, with two very different methods. The first was a big bordeaux style with long maceration on very ripe fruit. It took a couple...

Spot on. :)

They are not sour types (though the K Thermotolerans does produce good amounts of lactic acid, about the same as a low malic must put through MLF). I havenot used any chr hansen products, nor the lallemand T delbrueckii strain. There are quite a few commercial wineries using them as a "sort-of...

I started a thread over on GotMead (I'm primarily a mead maker) about some non-saccharomyces yeast that are out now, and I wanted to see if anyone here was interested. There are two products we're interested in: Chr Hansen Prelude, and Concerto, the first a strain of T. Delbrueckii, the second...

That is a very good thing to do for palate education. The BOMM recipe is good for quick turnaround, but I still prefer the flavor of wine yeast and the time it takes for those to batches to age.

There's a reason I have a blog: so I don't have to take up a ton of space in a single post. http://meadscience.blogspot.com/2014/05/sourcing-honey.html?m=1 Much shorter post, see?

It's hard to predict mead ferments without any nutrients, sometimes they finish reasonably quick and taste great, other times they can drag on for months, stop and restart, and taste terrible. I would suggest a sulfite addition just to make sure the mead is sanitary and that those bubles aren't...

Has the gravity change in the past month? Did you add sulfites? Did you add nutrients during fermentation? What yeast was used? Even if it's done, it will only get better with some more bulk aging. I generally try not to bottle until after a year of bulk aging; aside from giving the mead more...