Champaign exploding mead!

It may be considered improper by the mead making community but I am only on my second batch and when I rack I do it to 2 or 3 liter pop bottles with screw on tops so I can keep a close tab on such "pressurized incidents". All I have to do is thump the bottle and the sound tells me if continued fermentation is occurring. The bottles are built for pressure as well. I did have to "burp" my first batch for nearly a month and a half before it settled down.

It isn't all that uncommon for something made during winter, with residual sugar, to wake up during spring/summer with warmer temps. If you don't follow Joe's recipe, and have a non-stabilized mead with residual sugar, even if you think you are at the yeast's ABV tolerance, you need to take great care before bottling. What storage temp were you keeping?

One reason JAO is less prone to this problem is that it uses a bread yeast and is done at a high enough temperature that refermentation is quite rare.

So you used something other than Fleishmann's?

stromam said:

Oh i used Wyeast sweet mead which is supposed to be 11% alcohol tolerance

Click to expand...

So, yeah, although it was a lower-tolerance wine yeast, it wasn't bread yeast, so it's not terribly surprising it's continuing to ferment, if it was happy yeast it may well have exceeded its suggested alcohol tolerance. I can usually get about 10-11% out of bread yeast...

With JAO, the bread yeast will often get 13-14% ABV.

It's also fair to point out that when it comes to live ferments, you can still end up with a bottle bomb, even with PET soda/pop bottles (screw top type).

I sometimes make a ginger beer recipe, normally you mix it all up in the bottle, add the yeast and then just leave it on the kitchen top for a day or so.

The idea is that when the small amount of airspace in the bottle top goes firm/hard and the plastic can't be depressed with a finger/thumb it goes straight into the fridge at about 1 or 2 degrees C

I left some on top of the kitchen cupboards so I wouldn't get nagged by "erindoors" - it was there for about 4 days. The bottles were deforming with the pressure and I carefully lifted them down to put them in the fridge before doing anything else.

While I was gently putting them in the fridge, on of them toppled over, exploding as it hit the floor.

Ginger beer everywhere and while it was less than would have been with glass, I still received some abrasion injury.

So the reminder in this......... a ferment is capable of producing vastly higher pressures than machine bottled soda pop's etc - even in plastic bottles, caution and close adherence to those kind of techniques is advised/suggested......

regards

fatbloke