Cloudy Mead? Jao Recipe

[Canuckdownunder]

Hey AHB Crew!
So after 8 weeks of fermenting, the orange slices in my Jao Recipe mead have dropped! I was preparing to bottle when I thought that I should allow the mead to clear up beforehand.



I chucked the carboy into my fermenting fridge (currently set at 1c for lagering) and thought that it would clear up a bit. it's now been in there for 2 days and I haven't noticed any clearing happening.



Any ideas for why this is? Pectin haze from the orange slices? I didn't boil them or anything? Should I worry about the cloudiness or just bottle it as is? Thanks guys any help appreciated!

Canuck

 

[Airgead]

Patience grashopper. You must learn patience.

Let it sit. Let it clear. It might take a day or two, it might take a week or two. It might take longer. Mead always benefits from some age so sit back, chill, and let it do its thing.

Though you could rack it off the manky orange pieces at this point.

 

[TimT]

Wouldn't worry personally. Clouds are pretty!

 

[Canuckdownunder]

Wax on wax off eh?
Ok good advice I'm just chomping at the bit to actually try this stuff out! Could I rack it into bottles and allow the mead to age and clear in there?

 

[Airgead]

You could.... but -

It won't clear any faster and your bottles will end up with a bunch of sediment in them that may impact the long term aging of the wine. You probably don't want it sitting on dead yeast and other crap for 6 months or a year while it ages. If you let it clear in bulk, you bottle clear wine and it can age gracefully without all the crud present.

 

[superstock]

Here's a pic of my JAOM after 31 days the mead is clearing but the fruit has not yet dropped.
The mead next to it is another story. That was a straight mead put down on 27-7-2013 and stubbonly refused to clear. Read all about it ,here-http://aussiehomebrewer.com/topic/77352-have-i-done-the-wrong-thing/
After bottling this mead and checking for carbonation over several weeks,I stuck it in the cupboard to age. On17-2-2014 I noticed that it had cleared considerably and all the bottles had fine brown sediment in them. I decanted the bottles back to a demijohn an collected the sediment.
I then evaporated the sediment and it appears to be a very fine dust. The only place I can think it came from is the honey.
The demijohn is still sitting in my fermenting fridge, at what temp it happens to be and is slowly clearing

So what has been said,-----Patience

 

[TimT]

Dust? Could be pollen or dirt from the honeycomb or mixture of other bee products. Where did you get the honey from?

We removed a few frames from our bee hive last year, some of which were very old and had probably been put through several uses by the bees. So they were full of not only honey and pollen but propolis and dirt as well. The mead was coloured, for a time, rather.... well, brown. (Cleared up and became more orange over time).

 

[superstock]

Before it was evaporated it felt like soft clay mixed in water. I got the honey from a local apiarist at our local farmers market. I don't keep bees and can only say what it appeared to me. Will probably be clear by the time it's 12 months old.

 

[Airgead]

Yeah... I have had this with some honey I got through a hippy food co-op bulk buy. The hippies said it was uber organic, non heat treated, blah blah. I bought it cos it was really cheap.

When it refused to clear I asked a bee expert and they reckoned the bee keeper was selling it off cheap probably because it was from brood combs from a failed hive. Therefore full of bee bits and pollen.

2 years later and it still cloudy. I have tried every fining known to mankind (and some that aren't) and it still refuses to clear. Tastes Ok but cloudy.

Fortunately that honey is all gone now and I buy from reputable sources who don't try to palm off second rate stuff to ignorant hippies...

 

[superstock]

When I bought this honey,I found that the apiarist lives about 1/2 mile from my property & have since been to his place. Bought the honey for the JAOM from him. He is semi-retired and all his honey is raw, unpasteurised but filtered to remove any bits and mixed into one big heated vat which he decants from. I have the remnants of a 20 litre bucket from him that I have used with no problems.

PS maybe he didn't decant for a while and the sediment settled to the bottom of the taper.

 

[carpedaym]

I have a similar story. I bought some honey at the markets, type / origin unknown. I used it in 3 different meads (one JAO, one 12% dry 'traditional', one 8% strawberry), all using yeast from the same starter.

JAO and strawberry cleared nicely after maybe 6-8 weeks. The 'traditional' stayed cloudy, even though it had clearly finished at 0.995. So I left it another 3 weeks and bottled them all, figuring that it wouldn't clear.

That was about 4 months ago.

About 6 weeks ago I had a look at the bottles, and what do you know, the traditional had cleared and had sediment at the bottom.