Triple Mead Racking Day

I got off my lazy ass this last weekend and racked the three Meads that were needing it.  The Strawberry Banana Melomel,  Orange Zest Traditional Mead, and the straight Strawberry Melomel.

First up was the Strawberry Banana Melomel which had dropped almost crystal clear.  The results was a fine blanket of lees and crap that had built up at the bottom of the carboy.  Since I used 71B I do not want to let this thing sit on any amount of yeast lees for too long.  So I racked into another 5 gallon Better Bottle and decided to make up the lost volume with plain water.  I ended up needing to add 1.4 Liters to this batch which gives me a 7% dilution.  The new ABV for this one is 13%.  Not too shabby.  The next racking will be into bottles so no worries.  The smell of this was AMAZING.  Tons of strawberry and banana in the nose with a very good clean vinous character.  The taste was clean but still a bit raw.

And finally here she is all racked and on the mead shelf:

Next up was the Orange Zest Traditional Mead.  I also used 71B so its the same story here as with the Strawberry Banana.  I only needed to add 750ml of water to top this one up.  There were far fewer lees with this one.  I still don't like the taste of this one.  It was fermented hot (78F) and the nasty band-aid/medicinal/nasty taste is still quite strong.  This may age out in the next couple of years.... Here's to hope and patience.  The adjusted ABV is 14%.  Here are some pre-racking/racking pictures:

And now its put to bed:

Last up is the plain straight Strawberry Melomel.  It was just recently racked and dropped a TON of lees.  It is also a 71B yeast strain so I needed to get it off of that crap.  This batch was really far off on volume so I needed to make up a big volume.  As a result I didn't want to use straight water so I added a bottle of commercial mead.  It was a nice semi-sweet by Something... River.  Crap.  I can't remember the name now.   Anyways, one bottle of that plus 1.7 Liters of water.  Works out to an adjusted ABV of 12%.  A little light but I can deal with it.  The smell of this one was even more intensely aromatic strawberries.  Given the large amount of fresh fruit I wasn't surprised.  The taste was very clean, but still sharp and raw.  A little time and this is going to ROCK.

Somehow I didn't take any pictures of this one during or before... but here it is all tucked away.

All done, time to clean up the mess!