elderflower mead: a question

[BernardSmith]

Making some elderflower mead and after racking from the primary into my carboy I felt that the elderflower flavor was being dominated by the honey (I usually make elderflower wine using sugar). I added some dried elderflowers to an empty carboy and re-racked the mead onto these flowers. Of course, the CO2 pushed the flowers towards the top of the carboy. I have not tasted the mead again since I added the flowers on Sunday but my sense is that there would be more flavor extracted if the flowers were on the bottom rather than the top. Happy to buy some more dried flowers and bag 'em with marbles to weigh them down, place them in another carboy and rack the mead again onto them...but is there another way to solve this problem - namely, floating flowers that would be more useful if they were lower in the carboy? Thoughts? Thanks

 

[timber]

Hi Bernard,

Why not just let your mead run it's course.
No doubt it's very different than what you are used to (honey instead of sugar) but my guess is that there is still a good deal of fermentation yet to happen at this point (and flavors will change considerably).
Even when using sugar a wine will taste very different right out of the primary vs how it will taste after multiple racks and proper aging.

You didn't mention the current S.G. but as your mead goes through it's anaerobic stage and beyond very good things could happen.

Best of luck in all,
Dave

 

[BernardSmith]

Hi Bernard,

Why not just let your mead run it's course.
No doubt it's very different than what you are used to (honey instead of sugar) but my guess is that there is still a good deal of fermentation yet to happen at this point (and flavors will change considerably).
Even when using sugar a wine will taste very different right out of the primary vs how it will taste after multiple racks and proper aging.

You didn't mention the current S.G. but as your mead goes through it's anaerobic stage and beyond very good things could happen.

Best of luck in all,
Dave

No argument from me on your points, Dave. My question is slightly different, though. I added more flowers but I thought that they would tend to either stay at the bottom or drop to the bottom (I racked on to the dried flowers) but there is still a fair amount of CO2 in the liquor (the gravity is at 1.000 or lower) that has pushed the flowers to the top. That means that although they are all soaked I think that the alcohol would be able to extract more flavor from the florets if the flowers were all totally submerged. My question then is there an easy way to force them to the bottom or do I need to rack the wine into a clean carboy into which I have placed a weighted bag of flowers...

 

[timber]

Hi Bernard,

Didn't mean to distract from your question, just thinking out loud.
I bet that's going to be a great wine.
I think you probably are right on track in submerging the flowers.
Sanitized marbles in a nylon mesh would probably work well, especially if you don't pack the flowers in the bag too tightly so they get maximum exposure to the wine.

If you syphon most of the wine but pour the last of it into the nylon (in pail) you probably won't need to get more of the flowers.

Best of luck in all,

timber

 

[chasemandingo]

I love elderflower wine. When I made a gallon batch last year I used panty hose to contain the flowers and I used an oz. of dried flowers per gallon. Added to the primary and squeezed daily and there was a pronounced elderflower smell and flavor to the wine. I even used honey to bring up the S.G. but used Welch's white grape as the base so I had no issued with the honey overpowering the elderflower. I even used a pungent buckwheat honey.

 

[BernardSmith]

Buckwheat honey is the one honey I avoid. Buckwheat honey mead was among the very first wines I ever made about 20 years ago and it was almost undrinkable - not because of poor technique but because of the flavor. I stopped making wine for many years because of that "disaster" but about four or five years ago the caught the bug again.