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Bad flavor after bottling

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H

hendenburg2

Worker Bee
Registered Member
Aug 22, 2016
61
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So to start off with, here is the thread for the recipe in the Mead Log category: http://www.gotmead.com/forum/showth...l-(Blood-Orange-and-Hops)?p=262214#post262214

So when I first tried it and decided that it was good to bottle, it had a good flavor - not too sweet with a bit of a tang from the blood orange. No hop character whatsoever. It went into 14 brand-new Belgian-style 750mL beer bottles. Since they were new, I decided to put 1 drop of Star San concentrate in each. Each bottle was thoroughly washed out, until all of the foam was rinsed and drained out. All of the bottles were then corked with a natural cork.

Within 2 days, the flavor of had transformed from dry and pleasant to extremely dry and astringent. There was almost no honey flavor at all, just a bracing bitterness. Not sure what exactly happened, and what, if anything, can be done.

Any help would be appreciated.
 
There's a concept in the wine world called "bottle shock," it kinda happens to mead too.

That or it was the drop of Star San in each bottle. Honestly, I've never heard of anyone doing that. The most I've ever heard of anyone doing when bottling is using Star San--or their sanitizer of their choice--to rinse the bottle like they would any other piece of brewing equipment.

If it had to pick between the two I would say it was adding the Star San concentrate directly into the mead. It's really not meant to be added directly into the beverage. If you want to use an additive that has anti-microbial features potassium metabisulfite is the standard way to go. The formula for getting to a particular concentrate of sulfite is: ppm*L*2/100=g K-meta to add.

I hope age fixes the flavor. I'd put this one into the back of the closet and forget about it for a few years.
 
hendenburg2 said:
So to start off with, here is the thread for the recipe in the Mead Log category: http://www.gotmead.com/forum/showth...l-(Blood-Orange-and-Hops)?p=262214#post262214

Since (the bottles) were new, I decided to put 1 drop of Star San concentrate in each. Each (empty) bottle was thoroughly washed out, until all of the foam was rinsed and drained out. All of the bottles were then (filled with mead, then) corked with a natural cork.

Within 2 days, the flavor of had transformed from dry and pleasant to extremely dry and astringent. There was almost no honey flavor at all, just a bracing bitterness. Not sure what exactly happened, and what, if anything, can be done.

Any help would be appreciated.
Click to expand...

I think you misunderstood what he meant zpeckler. I have edited the quote above to how I understood the story.

Another explanation might be that you tasted this when it was sweet but the mead then continued to ferment extremely slowly and ever so slightly to tip the balance into too dry without you noticing. The lessened sweetness then failed to continue masking the astringency that was already there.
OR
You backsweetened the mead and tasted from the denser bottom part. Sugar makes mead denser so you were drinking mead which was above the average sweetness of the carboy. You then bottled and some bottles were filled by mead towards the end. If the racking cane was always at the bottom then the last bottles will be filled with less dense (more dry) mead. You opened a dry bottle and thought something changed but in fact half the carboy was like that all along. This happens to me with sweetness and fusels if I do not gently stir the carboy before filling bottles. However, my carboys are quite large at 54 litres and my syphon hose is very narrow and does not disturb the mead while syphoning. I don't think this is too much of an issue with smaller batches
 
Stasis - doubt it was continued fermentation, the time between the day I tasted/bottled and tried the first one was 2 days. Also, no displacement of the cork, even though I went from sea level to Denver (around 5,000 ft)

The thought of different sugar concentrations in each bottle did occur to me, and so I tried a second bottle from the other side of the box I put the bottles in, so basically, one bottle from the top of the carboy, one from the bottom. Not sure which one was from which part of the carboy but it didn't matter, they both tasted the same.
 
Never heard of bottle shock. What is that?

Also, what I might do is try some and move it to a 22 oz beer bottle that takes oxygen barrier caps. Keep that one in the same place and try it periodically (every 2 months or so)
 
So the quick and easy answer to "what is bottle shock"? It occurs right after wine has been bottled, and also after an old bottle of wine has been moved around to much. It is said that too much O2 due to the bottling has been introduced to the wine and it takes a while for the excess O2 to be woven into the mix so to speak. Same with the jostling around during travel. Older wines/meads will generally have some sediment that will then get mucked back into suspension.
 
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