Only once I've got yeast staggered by lemon juice addition, and that happened in secondary fermentation. If there is enough sugar (and, if I recall correctlt, there was added sugar in these ferments), they'll keep going. Acidity that slows them down for real is much higher, like what acetobacteria do. Yeast still thrives in bread starters and combucha, and those are sour!
There you go, now we know the answer for "what was thinking that person who chopped the very last tree on Easter island?"
Gudim and Nazim - best contemporary meme artists!
Was it pulpy? Particles tend to stabilize liquid interfaces.
I make and sell mucrocloning kits in anticipation to see this happen
Then it's effectively braggot. Embrace the froth, you are cookin!
Yeast does this if they are in really sweet spot for sugar, nitrogen, microelements, temperature, and pH. Almost always happens in braggot (once shot into ceiling with lock, was quite a mess), also if you add yeast fertilizer. I think I saw this reported reproducively for slightly over 23C lager yeast. And, well, insufficient headspace might be a problem. Don't worry, at least yet.
Are you boiling them? Why?
Mikrolisäys on toinen mahdollisuus. Voit otta osat paraista chileista, lisätä, jä säylyä sen lasiputkissa talvella. On helpompi kuin näkyy.
Then it'll totally ferment like crazy, I did this with honey and quartered oranges.
Aji norteno, luullo. Tämä kasvoi ulkona avomaassa, sitten ottin noin 90% vihreaa pois ja siirtin ruukuun.
So are you adding sugar this time or not?
Indeed, I had a stall once in a melomel with just a few lemons in secondary. Not a big deal since it was secondary, and residual sweetness counterbalanced the tartness nicely. Got really quickly really clean though.
I would say using just the skins for flavor is much more feasible. Also I quarter citrus, slicing them like this is just asking for lots of mush at cost of laborous slicing.
Ciders and cysers are perfect drinks for Gravmas celebration! Although myself I'm planning citrus melomel for the evening, brings up childhood memories. Tried to share photos of 3x decoction weisen from the eve, but lost fight to foam miserably, for it was not the first bottle for the evening.
My wife said that Christmas specials should be made on Christmas for the next one. Sounds legit. I think that'd be my plan for now.
Oh, sure, let's maybe keep them in hands of governments and corporations, those always behave responsibly, right?
Awesome, I should totally start making these things too and place them in my microcloning and brewing yeast webstore. This dude is a hero of our biopunk culture, weird that I haven't heard about this before!
U-tube is just a glorified pendulum. But using this classical U shape for liquids is worth it. Pendulums is how you measure mass if gravity is too low.
I know some people inverted U-tube and immersed piezo fork into liquid. Then they struggled with reflections and setting feedback right or making sweep practical enough. And then there is electrical connections going into the probe through liquid surface, which is another concern. Still, in batch process (and all brewing is batch process) immersible probe should be much faster and washable than flow-through, I guess.
Oh, got carried away and missed another question. I'm actually throwing all good quality stuff in melomels, there are no favorites really. Other than Vaccinium uliginosum (English words for berries are terribly misleading, used interchangeably for pretty much all berries of same color - so these are usually called "blueberries", but that's not what is called "blueberries" in USA, for example) berries that result in something that shames wine made of grapes - so much cheaper, literally grows in most unfarmable places, melomel tastes similarly but better, and no pretense about "grape locality" and "northern slope" - just good stuff, every time.
Cranberries and lingonberries are kind of staple berries here, rowan is less known but also abundant and tastes great. Other hidden treasures I've found include hawthorn, ribes, and (very unexpectedly) hippophae. Now it's time for imported citrus fruits (skins are best part for melomel) but I'm all out of started base mead (and almost out of space).
I used to buy directly from beekeepers (never from stores, that junk is just spoiled in most cases). Only from people you get to know personally, beekeepers are the most hardcore underground people around for some reason. They usually sell honey in meadmaking quantities much below retail. Just talk to people around, it's abundant all over the world. And the result is totally worth it.
I've been doing this for over 10 years now I think; had to move out of USA at some point and lose about 300L of product (it has to age, nothing you can do - and shipping alcohol is very complicated issue) - gave it away to friends, this was quite a challenge. Then started all over and over, the oldest bottles I have now are from 2019. The best time to make mead is 10 years ago, second best is now!
Then, recently I became a beekeeper myself. Oh, this is addictive stuff. My beehives are smart homes now, I can listen to the sounds of bees and check their environment from home and I'm going to start selling the system to other beekeepers within weeks. And something like this happens to anyone who gets into beekeeping, it drives you crazy. I won't be selling honey myself for some time though, as I've only started recently and all I get goes into mead I can produce myself until the families grow enough, who knows how long it will take?
At least I've learned the ins and outs of the trade, why exactly honey from somebody you trust is completely different from retail anonymous "local honey" jar in store (or much worse, imported ones). There are quite objective shortcuts that should not be done but are economically attractive.
Winter berries time
This time of year one thing happens that has absolutely no relation to holidays: late berries (cranberries, lingonberries, rowan) spent enough time in frozen state to develop flavor worth of melomels. A gift for self in several years, something to be safely forgotten until bottling and then again.
Of course, I've kept those in freezer, as I don't want to fight all the birds for rowans (note: they still had plenty, I'm not greedy) and I'm not that good at digging frozen forest floor for the rest.
I've made a yeast lab in Finland
I've been doing homebrewing together with my wife for quite some time, and at some point we started collecting a yeast library. There was a point in my life where we had an opportunity to start a company that does something we enjoy; we've tried starting an analytic lab for microbreweries (as we are both actually doctors in chemistry), but it didn't take off at all due to lack of demand (and COVID breakout), we had to switch to doing whatever brings cash (of course IT stuff it was, mostly, I feel ashamed).
But yeast library kept growing. We've decided to give it another try, got permissions from the Big Brother, and rolled out a small production!
We've deployed a webshop at https://store.zymologia.fi/ , there is other stuff that's kind of a byproducts of whatever other things we've had to do to get along (some of it was and is fun after all). The idea is that I don't think it makes sense to scale it up any further, we just have proper but minimalist equipment to do sterile pure cultu