August 4, 2018

My Blueberry Lavender mead is fermenting! There are beautiful bubbles in the airlock. It took a good 24 hours for things to start, which sounds like it’s perfectly normal. It’s not as frequent as some I’ve seen online, but I suppose that’s no problem.

I am obsessing about my mead. Here are some of my thoughts as I impatiently wait to be able to taste the stuff:

• I wasn’t sure if I cleaned everything thoroughly enough.
• I wasn’t sure if leaving so much room in the fermenter was going to be bad. Seems easier to put fruit in the big fermentor rather than using a carboy.
• I didn’t wait to pitch the yeast – just stirred it into hot water and pitched it. The instructions didn’t specify.
• I used 1/5 of the yeast (exactly 1 g of a 5 gram packet). The entire packet is for 5 gallons.
• I read about staggering the nutrient and energizer additions, but i had already added the whole amount.
• I wanted to take an SG measurement, but didn’t have anything to do it (i.e. a test tube).
• Fermentation started on day 1 and is progressing nicely on day 2.
• I read about degassing and since it sounded important i did a degassing on day 2 and nothing seemed to happen. Maybe because of the extra headspace in the fermenter? I am not going to worry about degassing again because I’m concerned about inadvertently contaminating the batch.
• My blueberries are floating. Maybe I should have crushed them?