I was wondering if there is any trick to removing fruit sediment from mead. I have a couple gallons of dragonfruit mead I racked once into two separate gallons. I put in 6 ibs of fruit to one gallon and a lot of water got sucked out of the fruit to make about 1.5 gallons. My problem is that like almost half of one of the gallons is sediment from the fruit, and the other is almost straight up fruit sediment. I'm not worried about the dead yeast sediment. I'll get to that later on my own accord. My issue is the fruit sediment. There is so much mead product trapped in between all that fruit sediment and I didn't make a $60 batch to end up with only 3 quarts of mead, you know?
I was thinking about mesh bags and cheese cloth. I know you can use mesh bags and weights to keep the fruit from hitting the surface of the must and reducing exposure. Yet mesh bags have a lot of open space for things to slip on through so I was thinking maybe cheese cloth could work.
Example being: before adding fruit to the must, wrap the fruit in a couple big sheets of cheese cloth and tie it so nothing can get out. Don't squeeze the cheese cloth or anything unless you really want that excess fruit juice and such. Now the only potential hazards that I could think of by doing this (after sterilizing the cheese cloth) is how would it affect the taste? Is cheese cloth viable? Are there better methods than cheese cloth? Machines to filter that stuff out? I'm not looking for perfection here, just something that works well enough to avoid throwing out a HUGE chunk of the product.
Any thoughts?
I was thinking about mesh bags and cheese cloth. I know you can use mesh bags and weights to keep the fruit from hitting the surface of the must and reducing exposure. Yet mesh bags have a lot of open space for things to slip on through so I was thinking maybe cheese cloth could work.
Example being: before adding fruit to the must, wrap the fruit in a couple big sheets of cheese cloth and tie it so nothing can get out. Don't squeeze the cheese cloth or anything unless you really want that excess fruit juice and such. Now the only potential hazards that I could think of by doing this (after sterilizing the cheese cloth) is how would it affect the taste? Is cheese cloth viable? Are there better methods than cheese cloth? Machines to filter that stuff out? I'm not looking for perfection here, just something that works well enough to avoid throwing out a HUGE chunk of the product.
Any thoughts?