The Transfer

This post is an update to the Applenoon Delight journey.

I have been away for awhile, although many things have been happening. There is another post that I am working on that was suppose to be finished prior to this post, but life happens. It will be forthcoming in the very near future. For now, Applenoon Delight has completed the hard part- it is a mead! It finished fermenting after 2 weeks. Sometimes I allow for the fermentation to occur a little longer, but I felt with the minimal "bubbles" from the airlock, and my busy schedule the time was right to allow the mead to age.

So the Applenoon Delight has been moved to the secondary fermenter. First, you can see that the honey at the bottom of the carboy has been "eaten" by the yeast. I was unsure of what would occur since I did not mix the apple juice and honey together well.

I first cleaned out the carboy that is the secondary fermenter very well. I also cleaned the racking cane, tubing, funnel, spoon, rubber stopper, honey jug. You may be thinking, "Rob, why are you cleaning some much stuff to move the mead from one container to another." Glad you asked, I am making another 6 gallons of Applenoon Delight with the same yeast. Reusing yeast is a way to save on cost, and since you are sanitizing might as well sanitize enough equipment to make more mead. The important pieces of equipment here are the racking cane and tubing.

The racking cane is a hard piece of plastic that you attach tubing to for easy transferring of mead from one place to another. In the past I have used an auto-siphoning starter, but over the years it was lost, stolen, destroyed, pooped on (one of these is true), so I have reverted back to using a regular racking cane. Some people just use tubing and curl it slightly to minimize transferring of sediment. I prefer the control of the racking cane. I slightly tilt the primary fermenter to have all the mead on one side was I siphon it out towards the end of the process.

You can see in this picture that I have placed the primary fermenter higher than the secondary. Gravity is your friend in this endeavor. Once the flow is started, gravity does the rest with ease. You do not want the flow to stop and start, creating air pockets and bubbles. Depending on the length of tubing you need to have it full stretched out, no "u" shapes in the tubing from primary to secondary. The tubing in the secondary fermenter needs to be placed at the very bottom or along the side of the carboy because you do not want to aerate the mead. It has finished fermenting, and some yeast will travel with it; remember yeast needs oxygen to help with the conversion process, so minimal aerating is a must. To start the siphoning I use the "sucking" process (I have no idea if they refer to this process as such, but overtly homosexual writing makes me giggle like a 10 year old boy). I suck on the end of the tubing to start the siphoning process. Here you can see me cleaning my mouth of bacterial, so as not to contaminate the mead.




In this picture I have taken a little and poured it into a glass. It had a very warm, alcoholic taste to it, but underneath I could taste the beginning of a very tasty Cyser. Part 2 will follow with the reuse of the yeast.