Racking to Secondary and Making the Mead

7 days have passed since pitching the yeast for the Belgian Golden Ale. This will be a slow fermentation and requires a secondary fermentation. This will prevent the dead yeast that will form at the bottom of the fermentation vessel from producing all kinds of off flavors as it decomposes. It will also remove a lot of the trub and hops that was in the primary fermenter.

Here is the beer moving into the secondary.

The primary, shown in a previous blog entry, is a "brew bucket" that is made of plastic. The secondary is a glass carboy. I haven't brewed in some years and when I inventoried my stuff I found I had 4 carboys, a brew bucket and a bottling bucket. The buckets were bought back about 3 years ago when I stopped brewing.

Now to digress: The event that caused the hiatus in brewing was due to UPS f*cking up the delivery of a beer kit. During a snowstorm (flurry activity actually). They delivered it to a house that was at the center of the zipcode. Left it in a pile of stuff dumped in the middle of some guy's driveway. I finally tracked down to where it was delivered and the guy wouldn't give me the kit. He had a ton of people's stuff and was trying to get UPS to pick it up and deliver it. UPS finally picked up the kit and when it finally arrived stuff was damaged inside the box. DME (Dried Malt Extract) was all over the inside of the box. I was freaking pissed and also out of time. I never made the kit. At that point I gave up. F*ck UPS. I went through a freaking pile of crap trying to file a claim. I came to the point of just cutting my loses with those as*holes. I still have what's left of the ingredients mixed in with my other beer stuff. In any event, I'm back to brewing. Now to de-digress:


Here's the what the primary fermentation vessel (brew bucket) looked like after racking the beer into the secondary. What's left is some hops, trub and dead yeast.



MAKING MEAD
Specifically Curt and Kathy's Saffron Metheglin kit from Northern Brewer. I actually purchased the kit back in June and ran out of time. Notice the time theme here. I typically don't have time for anything. Anyway. I go to read the instructions and I have two page ones that leave me in suspense on what exactly to do once I get the mead into a fermenter. Since Mead is another real slow fermentation it will also need to be racked into a secondary fermenter to prevent the mead from developing off flavors from the buildup of dead yeast. Hopefully someone at Northern Brewer will reply to my email and send me a new set of instructions. Mead for the most part is real easy to make. There is no hour plus long boils involved. This kits was extra easy. All that was boiled was 0.75 gallons of water.



Here is some of the stuff that came with the kit. The two things labeled LALVIN are packets of dried yeast. I am not a big fan of dried yeast but this is how the kit arrived and Curt and Kathy are award winning Mead people dammit. Top is two vials of "Go Ferm". Its some kind of dried yeast defribulator that gets it up to speed fast. The little dark bag below the vials is Persian (AKA: Iranian) Saffron (dried stigma's from a Crocus flower. And. Four packets of Curt and Kathy's yeast nutrients.


Here's the honey warming and becoming less viscous while sitting in a cooler of hot water.


This is what 0.75 gallons of water looks like just before it starts to boil.



Vials of Go Ferm were filled to 20mL with warm (105F) water, whatever that meant since there were no markings on the vials. The yeast poured in on top of the warm water. This sat for 15 minutes while a packet of yeast nutrients was dumped into the arboy loaded with 3 gals of room temp water. 15 pounds of honey were poured into the carboy and mixed. The Go Ferm yeast vials were shook until they mixed. The yeast was pitched into the must after the boiling water was mixed into the fermenter.


Mead ready to ferment!


Mead is to the left. Belgian Golden Ale is to the right.

CHEERS!