Comment on Beginner Questions
alzymologist@sopuli.xyz 6 days ago
Hello and welcome to the club, buddy!
- I’m all for slow-release nutrients, not mixing it in thoroughly might actually be a good thing; I dump whole almonds as nutrient source, those have no chance of dissolving at all and they work perfectly. Yeast with too easy access to nutrients misbehaves - like any fertilizer, it’s too easy to overdo.
- Same here; yeast metabolism has nothing on the timescale of overflow event. What often happens, dissolved gas un-dissolves on nutrient addition because of salinity change. Nutrients are fertilizers essentially, common nutrients are something like pretty much inorganic salts that dissolve instantly, smarter products like Fermaid are supposed to be proper large organic molecules or even chunks of dead cells that metabolize slowly and almost do not dissolve, thus no salinity change and no gas evolution. That’s good, rapid salinity changes are harmful for cells too.
- That really depends on quality of water. In Texas, I used only bottled water; here in Finland I don’t even boil tapwater that goes into mead, room temperature all the way. Besides, sanitationrequirement is connected to yeast health and vigor - it isn’t easy to infect fresh angry starter, yeast population running at full speed would devour all life in its wake given enough energy supply. Especially if it’s good strain (seeing Fermaid I suppose you are Lallemand fan, their yeast is especially good at killing competition). Those fruits in fermentation are not really sterile either, right?
Thanks for the input! I actually froze the fruit before adding it (both to kill as much bacteria as possible as well as breaking down the cell walls for better infusion). I don’t know that it counts as “sanitizing” to freeze it, but I read somewhere that it helps. I’m using Lalvin D47 currently, seems easy enough to get going aggressively.
Freezing does not help much with life that has any chance of surviving the yeast onslaught; the only thing it probably does - it slows cell development down to about same amount of time it takes dry yeast to wake up, thus with a starter you get more of head start for the good guys, and that’s all that you really need. Freezing also often results in better sugar availability, as some plants (well I suppose berries mostly) trigger sugar conversion on overwintering naturally. D47 is good for fruits, I maintain its descendant in a pure culture and it’s one of my favorites for mead.