Hi everyone,
So I decided to try brewing some mead and my first batch took off like a rocket. I used three pounds of honey in a one gallon carboy. My starting gravity was 1.092. Yeast: Lalvin 71B-1122
After about 11 days, the airlock was bubbling about once every 30 seconds or so so I checked the gravity and it had dropped to 1.000. I had heard that you have to age mead for quite a while before it is drinkable (taste-wise anyways) so I wanted to cheat that a little and decided to rack it over some raspberries for about a month before bottling. To do this, I first (probably my biggest mistake) crushed up a campden tablet and added it to my mead to kill of the fermentation. I waited about 14 hours and racked it onto a pound and a half of raspberries in a 2 gallon bucket, applied an air lock and waited.
I had read/been told to periodically check the taste so I would know when to rack back into a carboy off the fruit for aging so I opened my bucket 2 days later and was hit by a small wave of sulfur stench. My first thought was to panic that the fruit may be rotting. Upon some googling it sounds like I stressed my yeast by adding that campden tablet too early which didn't kill off my yeast completely. So the sulfurous smell is coming from the stressed yeast.
I had read that to combat this I can add some energizer and nutrient to feed my yeast and remove the stress. I did this about a day ago but my airlock still appears to be dead and no longer blowing off CO2. So my question is whether I should add some more yeast now or wait a day or two to see if fermentation kicks back up before adding yeast again? The mead is currently probably at about 10% alcohol content so I'm not sure how well freshly hydrated yeast will do. Any advice is much appreciated, I'm a bit unsure of how to proceed.
Thanks in advance for any support!
So I decided to try brewing some mead and my first batch took off like a rocket. I used three pounds of honey in a one gallon carboy. My starting gravity was 1.092. Yeast: Lalvin 71B-1122
After about 11 days, the airlock was bubbling about once every 30 seconds or so so I checked the gravity and it had dropped to 1.000. I had heard that you have to age mead for quite a while before it is drinkable (taste-wise anyways) so I wanted to cheat that a little and decided to rack it over some raspberries for about a month before bottling. To do this, I first (probably my biggest mistake) crushed up a campden tablet and added it to my mead to kill of the fermentation. I waited about 14 hours and racked it onto a pound and a half of raspberries in a 2 gallon bucket, applied an air lock and waited.
I had read/been told to periodically check the taste so I would know when to rack back into a carboy off the fruit for aging so I opened my bucket 2 days later and was hit by a small wave of sulfur stench. My first thought was to panic that the fruit may be rotting. Upon some googling it sounds like I stressed my yeast by adding that campden tablet too early which didn't kill off my yeast completely. So the sulfurous smell is coming from the stressed yeast.
I had read that to combat this I can add some energizer and nutrient to feed my yeast and remove the stress. I did this about a day ago but my airlock still appears to be dead and no longer blowing off CO2. So my question is whether I should add some more yeast now or wait a day or two to see if fermentation kicks back up before adding yeast again? The mead is currently probably at about 10% alcohol content so I'm not sure how well freshly hydrated yeast will do. Any advice is much appreciated, I'm a bit unsure of how to proceed.
Thanks in advance for any support!