Well today was the day we racked the mead….that is, we transferred it from the one container to another.

After two weeks, the specific gravity had dropped from 1.050 to 1.001. It was great to see a drop, because we hadn’t actually seen much fermentation going on. We decided to leave it another week as the weather had been very cool which had likely slowed the primary fermentation down. The following week, the SG had dropped to 0.999, so we decided to proceed with the racking. The glass carboy was sterilised and well rinsed, then placed on the floor below the tap of the primary fermenter.

Transferring the mead to the glass carboy

The tap in the primary fermenter is placed to allow the must to flow, but leave behind the lees, or sediment sitting on the bottom.

Once the transfer was complete, the stopper and airlock were put in place, and the carboy moved to the cool produce room to continue fermenting and clearing!

The warm weather in Perth has meant quite an extended growing season for some of our edibles, so the produce room is filling up! We had to rearrange shelving to enable us to fit in more jars of produce on one side, but gave us space on the other for our beekeeping gear. We also purchased a ‘wine’ cooler in which to keep produce that needed refrigerating, as the main fridge was getting too full!

Produce shelves filling up!

Another honey harvest this week gave us over 3 litres of honey from two frames. We were a bit more ‘vigourous’ with scraping the capping off and left it to drain a bit longer than last time. Also this time, we cleaned up the wax capping to enable us to use the beeswax!

Plenty of honey and some beeswax ready for making lip balm!