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r/mead • … • u/zojbo

Racked too soon...rack back?

I had a batch running in primary that:

* Started out going strong, going from about 1.11 to about 1.04 in a little over a week. * About a week later had only gotten to 1.02 (was expected to ferment dry or nearly so) * Started dumping sulfur. * Started tasting pretty terrible as well.

I figured it was too late to try to nourish the yeast, so instead I racked it into jugs, sulfited it, and started cold crashing it. The hope was that the yeast would actually die off (since some of them had already started doing so). It stayed cold for about two weeks. Sediment settled out nicely, and taste tests started getting pretty decent. So I figured I'd warm it up to room temperature and then bottle it, being sure that the ferment didn't start back up in the jugs before bottling (bottle bombs are bad). I checked the gravity at this stage and saw 1.012, distinctly lower than it was when I cooled it down.

You probably see where this is going: upon warming up, the ferment started back up in the jugs. Staggering numbers of yeast rafts shot up, and now at most 20% of the lees is at the bottom of the jugs. The rest of them are back in solution doing their thing.

Now for my question. I filled 3 of the 4 jugs to minimize head space (one of them was just what was left over, started out about 2/3 full, and is now about 1/2 full after samples). One of the jugs is starting to get significant foam at the top, so I'm concerned about the lack of head space in these jugs. Is it wise to rack it back to the primary container? Would it be better to just rack \~10% from each of the 3 full jugs into the partial jug so that they all have a little bit of head space without losing so many yeast cells?

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