Won't Clear/Tastes Hot

Back sweetening will guarantee your mead will cloud again, usually for months. If you didn't stabilize before backsweetening you may have had renewed fermentation, giving you the alcohol hot/harsh. Did you do a gravity check before & after backsweeten and now.
If you let it set a day (usually hours) after moving it the previously settled lees will resettle pretty quickly without a fining agent. You will learn the 'carboy crawl' to move your mead without disturbing the lees. You maybe should have rack it off the superkleer as soon as it finished its job, I have read 2 weeks at the most. If I was you, and I am not, I would give it another couple months at least and see what it needs then.

Did it taste hot before the last time you tried it? The heat and buzz could be from fusels which might need quite some time to age out. Since you have 2 problems which might just need time to age out I probably wouldn't add anything more to the mead and just wait
What kernel crush says is interesting.. I never thought of how lees which are stirred up tend to settle much faster than lees in general. This probably means that once yeast flocculates (clumps together) it tends to be stirred up as big clumps and stays clumped together, thus settles much quicker

Regarding the lees, that agrees with my experience as well. It takes some time for the yeast to settle out, but once they do they'll drop back to the bottom quickly when disturbed. With bottles of commercial bottle-conditioned beer or cider (and my own bottles of mead that weren't totally clear at the time of bottling) all it seems to take is 12-24hrs before the lees are settled back down to the bottom of the bottle and the beverage is clear again.

If you haven't taken it off the lees after super kleer, you really should. Let them settle back down and rack as soon as possible.

I love super kleer and I'm a big cheerleader for it but just as i don't like to leave mead on gross lees for more than a month after it has stopped fermenting, I rack off super kleer even quicker.

Like filtering, fining agents 99% of the time only used to get an extra hit of clarity that would usually take years to achieve. Using it as a substitute for your initial flocculation drop which normally takes 30 to 90 days and then expecting nothing more to drop out of suspension is a road to disappointment.

When you have a stubborn mead that wont clear at all after a few months, its a miracle substance. But even then there may still be some sneaky lees waiting to drop out.

What everyone eventually learns is that there is no substitute for time.



Sent from my TARDIS at the restaurant at the end of the universe while eating Phil.

I am considering sparkolliod

Click to expand...

Sparkolloid works very well from what I have tried, but I found it will continue to drop out for many 6 months after use, which could be a good thing.. Just when you think you got it you put some in a bottle and you still get a dusting. SuperKleer works great with both a positive and negative charge. I have a big Sparkolloid bag in the freezer I haven't touched in a while