Peach Melomel - Tasting & Bottling

Three months have passed since I racked the peach melomel to let it clarify. Passive clarification was effective in this case. The melomel was crystal clear at the time of bottling.

I siphoned the melomel into a sterilized carboy, and stirred it vigorously for about ten minutes. This was to remove residual carbon dioxide. I actually did a taste test before and after stirring, and it was easy to detect the reduction in carbonation. I also took a specific gravity reading, and found it unchanged from the previous measurement.

Bottling was a snap. The three gallon batch is a good size for my purposes. This yielded 14 (and half) bottles in the end. Some volume is always lost in the racking, but that's fine.

Bottles of peach melomel.

I like the taste of this batch. The taste is light and reminiscent to some dry white wines. It has a mild honey aroma, and the honey taste seems most noticeable at the front and middle. Then, a gentle fruit flavour emerges at the end. The acidity is just right. But the odd thing is that I have a hard time identifying a peach flavour!

Fruit flavours come from organic compounds called esters, and the pure compounds have very specific tastes and aromas. One of the fun things about esters is that they are easily transformed into other esters, under certain chemical conditions. That means you can transform an ester with one particular flavour into another ester that has a totally different flavour. All you have to do is mix up the ester with a little acid and an alcohol compound (the alcohol that we drink is an alcohol known as ethanol).

So, here's one hypothesis: peach flavour comes from "linalyl" esters. In the presence of ethanol and acid, these could be converted to the corresponding "ethyl" esters. The ethyl esters in question are present in bananas, lemons, pineapples, and strawberries. When I sip this peach melomel, I taste hints of all of these. (Caveat: this is just a hypothesis.)

Another, perhaps more likely, scenario is that the peach linalyl esters decomposed into carboxylic acids, which do not have fruit flavours at all. :(

"Peach" Melomel. More like "Fruit" Melomel.

 

Stuck Fermentation

What is it about mead and stuck fermentation? If you google search "mead stuck fermentation", you find that this is a widespread problem for home mead makers. I recently had to deal with it in my most recent attempt at mead.

Back in August, secondary fermentation of this mead had more or less stopped. Things had been going pretty well, and I assumed that most of the sugar must have been used up by the yeast. As I noted in an earlier post, I broke my hydrometer and therefore had no quick way to measure the specific gravity. (Actually, I could have measured out a volume of mead and measured the mass, from which you can easily calculate density. I have a cute little jeweller's electronic balance that measures to 0.01 g.) So, without knowing the completeness of the fermentation, I racked the mead with the intention to let it age and clarify.

As the mead was "aging", I noticed that there was a constant, very slow rate of gas production in the carboy. In the meantime, the batch of peach melomel was getting to the end stage of secondary fermentation, and it was time to rack it. Last week, I decided to rack the melomel and the mead, checking the specific gravity of each using my new hydrometer. Here's what I found:

Peach Melomel s.g. = 0.990 (Conclusion: fermentation is complete, and it's time to let it age)

Mead s.g. = 1.038 (Conclusion: oh crap, fermentation is stuck)

So, I had to intervene. I added two Campden tablets (crushed and pre-dissolved), 1 tsp of yeast nutrient, and a packet of Lalvin EC-1118 yeast. Bubble formation seemed to pick up within a few hours. The next day, gas production still wasn't as fast I would like, so I raised the temperature in the room using an oil heater, and also added 2 tsp of yeast energizer. Yeast energizer has a slightly different nutrient mix as yeast nutrient. Three days later, the fermentation in the mead was chugging along nicely, and continues:

Gas production after kick-starting the fermentation

with yeast nutrients and higher temperature.

Did fermentation resume because of added nutrients for the yeast, the higher room temperature (from 17 up to 22 degrees C), or both? I don't really know, but I suspect it was mostly the nutrients. After all, the peach melomel, which presumably had more nutrients from the peach juice, seemed to work out fine in the relatively cool room in which I keep this stuff. Lesson for next time: add more nutrient, with the proviso that "yeast energizer" is likely the more effective.

Peach Melomel

For a couple of years, I have followed home winemaking posts about small batches of melomels. A melomel is simply a mead amended with some kind of fruit. You can use any kind of fruit you want. The resulting mead will have a mix of honey and fruit flavours.

I had some good honey leftover from the most recent batch of mead, and we had some fresh fruit from British Columbia, including some very juicy, perhaps even overripe, peaches. This presented an opportunity to try making a peach melomel, which struck me as a potentially nice combination.

Here's the recipe I used:

- 10 L of filtered water
- 3 campden tablets
- 2 tsp yeast nutrient
- 1 tsp peptic enzyme
- approximately 3 kg honey
- 1 cup of sugar*
- 11 pitted peaches, sliced
- packet of Lalvin EC1118 yeast

*Sugar was needed because the dissolved honey only gave s.g. = 1.078. The sugar brought up the s.g. to 1.086.

After mixing up all the ingredients except fruit and yeast in my primary fermentation bucket, I put the peaches in a nylon straining bag, tied it off, and squeezed the peach juices into the must. The amount of peach juice was surprising. I put the whole bag of strained peaches into the must and let it sit for 36 hours. After removing the bag, I sprinkled yeast on the surface. A few hours later, fermentation was going strong.

Fermentation "head" on the peach melomel

After six days of primary fermentation, the 'head' had collapsed, and s.g. = 1.024. I transferred to a sterilized 3 gallon carboy for secondary fermentation.

Peach Melomel in Secondary.

Unfortunately, these pics don't really show the subtle peachy colour of this melomel. I'm looking forward to seeing how the colour turns out after it's aged, clarified, and bottled.