Mead Journal: Pineapple Lime

Ok, I finally racked the second mead that I had in the primary. I racked it onto the juice of 5 pineapples and the remainer of the lime juice that I had frozen from the lime mead. It was about 3 cups of lime juice and about a gallon of fresh pineapple juice. I found a deal on pineapples. My local mexican market had them for 99 cents for 2 pounds. Considering that Safeway had them for $3.99 a pineapple and a single pineapple is about 2-3 pounds. Yeah. Much better deal. They also had large papayas that looked good. For fresh fruits and veggies, I highly recomend a place such as that. But anyway. I forgot to take gravity mesurements prior to the racking, ooopse. By the looks of it it should turn out well. That is ofcourse leaving it on the lees of the primary fermentation for like 2 months doesn't hurt it. I don't think it will but never know. I am tempted to put a touch of mint extract in it to round out the flavor. It had a bunch of yellow froth on the top from the process. I froze the pulp that came out of it. I am going to thaw the pulp and then treat with pectic enzyme and maybe eek out a couple of cups of juice. For those that question the method here's the logic: Freezing fruit breaks down the cell walls on fruit, that is why it is always mushy when thawed of you freeze something. Thawing it is to make it manipulate-able. Also the pectin enzyme breaks down the cell walls and he "Gummyness" of it, much like you get when you cook fruit for jam. That gummyness is the pectin that serves as gluing the fruit flavors and juice and binding them to the solids. I just want the juice so the process. Then I run the resulting pulp through a screen with a spatula. When I did it to my pears, I got a full 3 cups more juice out of it. And watermellon even more.

Anyway, that is all.

Except that the Binary Rockbitter is ready for bottling. Just don't have delabled bottles in it. Those should be ready to drink in the summer. I am doing what basically amounts to bulk aging. That is aging in the carboy to get a more even aging. It is not on purpose, I just don't have any honey for more batches. Arrg.

Anyway, NOW that is all

Dave