This is a very special episode of Ask the Meadmaker because any time we get to spend together is special to me.
Welcome to Ask the Meadmaker, where I, Ricky the Meadmaker, answer your questions about mead making, mead drinking, mead brewing, and really any question you're willing to send to me. The first question this week comes from Matt and Stephanie. They want to know if I'll do a Groennfell and Havoc episode of this show. I thought to myself, why the heck not?
That was a doozy.
Next question comes from Mikey and a lot of people ask me about fruit. Do I do whole berry? Do I do juice? Do I do concentrate? The answer, as I've said before, is it depends on what I'm making. Sometimes I do juice, sometimes I do concentrate for consistency. Here's the important thing as a homebrewer. If you are fermenting in a carboy, please put the fruit in in a form that it will not gunk the neck of the carboy and create pressure until the carboy explodes. I am not saying this from personal experience, but I do know people it has happened to.
Dion wants to know how I degas a fermentation when it's as big as 400 gallons. I don't know why he picked that number. Ours are a little bigger than that. But anyway, the answer is I pick up my tanks and they shake them back and forth. No, that's not true. We actually use CO2 purging at that volume, where we push bubbles in the bottom to knock the bubbles out of solution.
Trent has some sort of carbonation system that gives him a readout of the volumes of CO2 and he had some bottles that were 2.4 volumes. They exploded. He had some that were two volumes. They were very carbonated, but they did not explode. Trent, something is wrong in your system. 2.4 volumes is high carb but definitely does not blow up bottles, and two volumes is barely petillant in many products. Check your system and send me another email.
I was really excited because our last question I thought came from Dean Cain, star of Lois and Clark. Apparently it's from a guy named Dan Cain. Still a good question, if a little confusing. He wanted to know if I'm really that good at juggling and the answer is, Dan, how do you pretend to be good at juggling?
That was our last question this week. Keep sending them and I'll get to them as soon as possible. Cheers!
