Brewing Mead - after the fermentation

After the bubbling was stopping to be so aggressive, it was time to pump the liquid into a new glass. I tried to use a filter and i did not go bellow a certain level inside the container so the old used up yeast was not sucked into the new container. This is done so the old yeast does not bitter up the whole batch.

So the fermentation stopped. What now?

When the fermentation stopped we started reading into clearing the liquid.
There are a few options like silicic acid or gelatin. We decided to use silicic acid. For each batch we added about 5 ml and waited a week after that. It cleared some but nowhere near what we hoped for.

Now it was time to season and bottle the mixture.

We then tried once again to pump the mead into a cooking pot while filtering as much as possible. Sadly you loose some of the fluid in this process. We also started baking the bottles so they are somewhat desinfected.

We then boiled the meat at 80 degree Celsius to kill everything that could start to ferment again. We don't want anything like that in the bottles to happen as it could start to introduce a sparkling effect on the mead. For the classic honey mead we mixed in a bit of honey while boiling and bottled it up. For the apple mead we decided to experiment a bit. We had bottles with just the mead without anything, one with a vanilla bean in it, ones with vanilla sugar and some with vanilla extract.

So, now the bottles will chill for at least half a year inside our basement where it is cool. I cant wait to taste it. Perhaps we will start a new cherry batch soon.