Testing/Sampling and transfer of your mead

[Dmntd]

I'm a morning person, waking daily around 03:00 PST. I work in the motion picture industry as a Studio Grip, though I'm not working at the time due to bilateral herniations at L4-5 and L5-S1 (talk about a pain the the arse).

So I get up this morning, and after 30 min. in the Spa, 30 min. icing down my back and a hot shower I set myself to the task of taking S.G. readings and tasting the mead I have fermenting/aging. With 7 carboys of mead, ranging in A.B.V. of 10% - 25% A.B.V., and having drank the sample drawn form each for the reading, I feel like I'm ready for the caber through, while in reality I'm ready for a nap (how sad is that).

Whats really scary... Looking up at the clock and seeing it's 13:50, makes me wonder just where exactly has the day gone, I just got up, or so it seems.

The real reason for this post... A means of racking your mead without having to lift a heavy full carboy, mix the lees into suspension or add stress and strain to your body.

I bought carboy caps a while back thinking I could pass a racking cane through one port of the cap on each carboy, run a tube between these and rack my mead from one to another carboy without leaving the carboy open, as soon as I pull the plug from a carboy those little flying pest swarm. This worked pretty well, adding a short section of tubing to the second port of the full carboy provided a means of starting the syphone by blowing into the full carboy.

Then came the idea to use a tank of C02 to provide possitive pressure to the full carboy to power the transfer and reduce 02 expossure. finally ending in, flushing the sanitised carboy with C02, prior to a pressure driven transfer from one carboy to the next.

The way this works; set an empty sanitized carboy on the floor next to the one I'm racking from, place a carboy cap on both with a racking cane in one port and tubing run between the two canes, purge the empty carboy with C02, then run C02 into the full carboy to force the mead into the fresh carboy. When all is said and done, the only thing left to lift is a carboy with the lees in the bottom.

Anthony