Pineapple Coconut Melomel (Mead) - Let there be COCONUT!

Cool.  So that addition of Super-Kleer K.C. worked pretty well I would say.  The picture below doesn't really look it but once I shone a flashlight into it I could clearly see the compacted lees on the bottom.  Since most of the major crap fell out I decided to pull the trigger on racking and also add the coconut to the mix.

I found some bulk shredded died coconut at a local Smith's Grocery and bought 5 pounds of it.  It looked like a lot of Coconut in the bags, but in a 6 gallon carboy it looks like a LOT of coconut...

The racking went smooth.  My total volume of mead was just right.  As you can see in the photo below it came right up to the neck just as the racking cane started sucking air.  After this photo I ended up adding a touch of water to bring it up just a bit more...

Along with the mead itself I also added 6g of K-Meta (Potassium Metabisulfite) which works out to the addition of total SO2 = 150ppm.  Considering the rule of thumb that ~50% of added Sulfite gets bound immediately that results in 75ppm of Free SO2.  This mead's pH is 3.4 so that mean the molecular SO2 is 1.84ppm.  For normal bulk aging a molecular SO2 level of 0.8ppm is the target.  But since I put a bunch of very non-sanitized coconut into the mix I wanted to bump it up a good notch.  The nominal sensory threshold for Sulfites lies at a molecular SO2 level of 2ppm.  So my addition of 1.83ppm molecular SO2 should be just fine at this point.  Once I rack off of the coconut into a 5 gallon carboy I'll maintain a 0.8ppm Molecular SO2 level.

Here is what was left in the primary fermenter... YUMMY!

Well, that's it for the next few months.  I'll pop a few pictures here and there to show off its progress but at this point I'm going to be hands off...

Time to think of my next batch.


UPDATE: 5/21/12 12:30PM
After slapping the carboy around a bit along with some swirling and shaking I got most of the coconut to drop.  On further though I'll probably stick a racking cane down there and stir it up a bit once a week for 3-5 months....