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Smells great! tastes awful...

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RachmaelBenApplebaum

RachmaelBenApplebaum

NewBee
Registered Member
Sep 7, 2011
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I am a mass of organic molecules called "RachmaelB
So in January I put this recipe together and let it run, neglected in a closet without messing with it until this recent monday. I totally ignored it and let nature run it's course. Didn't even rack it. I opened it monday to rack it into two 1 gallon jugs for more bulk aging and it smelled fantastic, but tasted awful. The smell was super fruity and awesome but it tasted rotten somehow? It had also browned heavily. I'm at a loss as to why it's so terribly unpalatable but I'm hoping some aging will bring it back to life? maybe it could do with some kind of fining? I'm pretty stumped on this one.
 
Well, you left the fruit in there for six months. Most of the 'good' flavours you can get out of fruit are used up in 1-3 weeks (depending on the fruit and amount of surface area). That is a lot of time for the fruit to turn on you. I'm sure someone else can use more scientific words, but basically your pear decomposed and all the nasty bits from that are now in your mead.
 
I've never left pear in that long, but I can say from experience that oranges and cranberries seem to do OK. The one batch I ever tossed in my life was grapes that I'd forgotten about like this, two drops numbed my tongue and hit all the "DANGER" triggers...

But I agree that leaving it in that long is probably why it tastes off. And the heavy browning is more than likely oxidation (pears oxidize FAST), so you may have the dreaded cardboard taste going on too.

Sometimes if you use nuked bread yeast, it will absorb some of the yucky flavours, and I'd be interested in hearing if there's a difference if you treated one gallon like that, and compared it to the other, but no guarantees that it'll improve anything. If you're desparate to save the batch, maybe some activated charcoal (aquarium grade) might help too, although it might suck out all the lovely aroma you want to save...
 
No, not really desperate. It never tasted good to begin with honestly, after about a month I tried it and it was awful then, thus the shunning neglect. What it does give me is the chance to do some heavy-duty experimentation. The only reason I split it up is because I needed the 2-gallon pail that it was in for another mead to rack into. So I kinda figured the browning was from fruit oxidation, but there was also molasses in there so it was kindof a tossup.

Maybe I'll treat one with the bread yeast and one with PVPP and compare the two? I've never even used PVPP but I've read plenty about it and it would be interesting to check out how much browning in the wine it can reduce. I'll have to get the Polyclar stuff that you don't need to filter since I don't have one, but still all is not lost, I have some pretty weird batches sittin around in various stages that let me conduct mad-scientist-like trial and error learning. Frankenstein had plenty of failures ;)
 
wet cardboard, bland, vaguely spicy and tastes nothing like the smell. I think since it smells so good and tastes horrible the taste is made even worse because of the deception. I've heard of using some kind of copper derivative but I can't get it locally here, I'd have to order it. The batch isn't worth saving to that extent but I will probably see if some PVPP would change anything.
 
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