Re: making blueberry melomel

I use to make wine with out sulfites or with low sulfites but after having a
number of batches decline early I now use recommended levels.  Actually, you
will probably find that levels recommended for home winemaking are less than
you find in commercial wines.  But if you still want to make it without
sulfites there are several suggestions:

1)  Make low alcohol meads.  Aim for 9-11% or at most 12%.  These will be
drinkable much sooner.  Without the sulfites you should plan on drinking it
young as it will not reliably age long.  One to 2 years at most.  Wines I
have made without sulfites are in serious decline by 3 years or even sooner.

2)  Handle it as little as possible.  Rack fewer times.  After moving to
secondary let it partially clear before you rack off the leas.  At least 2
or 3 months after fermentation ends.  Do not open it and check the SG until
you are ready to rack it.  This will cut down on air contact.  Do not rack
again until it is clear.

3)  When you do have to handle the wine (remove the airlock) you may want to
use some inert gas to displace the air in the head when putting the airlock
back on.  You could use one of those little spray cans of inert gas you can
get at a regular wine store.

4)  Be sure to keep your airlocks well filled.  Even if they do not dry out,
if they just get low, temperature differences could pump air through the
airlock to come in contact with the mead.

5)  I suspect that screw cap bottles will work better for you than corked
bottles.  With screw caps you can fill up close to the top and then cap.
All the air you are getting will be that under the cap.  With corks, when
you press the cork home you are compressing air equivalent to the volume of
the cork down against the wine.  You could have 3-5 times as much air as
with a screw cap, compressed to 2 or 3 atmospheres in contact with your
wine.  If protected with sulfites this is not a problem.  Without them ...

5)  I recommend that you consider adding 50 ppm (1 Campden tablet/gal) at
the start of fermentation anyway.   Virtually all of this will be gone by
the time you bottle, which is what you want, but it will protect the mead
during primary when air is in contact with the mead.

Ray

"news-server.tampabay.rr.com" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Hello everyone.
> I as well am a newbei to the making of mead.
> I just started a gallon of plain honey mead last friday on the 21st of
Nov.
> I also started a small bottle of blueberry melomel on Wednesday the 26th.
> These are both my verry first. I wanted to try doing it without using any
> sulfites because they give me horrible headaches.
> What I was wondering is how long should I wait before I rack them the
first
> time? The gallon of plain mead already has quite a bit of sediment on the
> bottom? Any other advice on keeping the mead from being ruined without
using
> sulfite would be great to. I would really like to at least have something
> drinkable for my first time. I'm going to start a gallon of ale mead
> tommorrow. My hopes are that one will come out drinkable heheh.
> Any advice is very apriciated. Its nice to see that there is atleast one
> newsgroup out there for mead making.
> Thanks everyone,
> Your new loyal member,
> David
>
>