For context, I’ve dabbled in home brewing. I’ve made ~4 successful batches based on online recipes. I wouldn’t call myself an expert, but also not a complete amateur.
So what happens if you don’t rack your mead/wine? I suppose the notion I have is to let it set in primary (assuming there’s no fruit/spices to remove after initial fermentation) until its fully clarified before going straight to bottling?
I guess I’ve assumed there is some problem in the clarification step if you don’t “get rid of” the dead yeast that precipitates, but I’ve never seen anything exploring that as a method.
Can anyone offer their experience?
That’s fine. The old advice for racking off the yeast is because that’s what the big professional brewers/winemakers do. The difference being yeast sitting on the bottom of 5 gallons of beer/wine vs yeast sitting on the bottom of 100,000 bbls. The massive weight crushes the yeast and then lets some undesirable flavors into the beverage. At the homebrew scale this just doesn’t happen.
The only thing to be wary of without racking off the yeast is that it’s easy to stir a bunch of the sediment back up if your racking cane moves around during bottling.
Right, “professionals” care about autolisis, they filter the stuff afterwards anyway or sell musty immature stuff. Neither is cool for mead - but waiting is not cool for business.
As @MuteDog@lemmy.world said, but I’d add just one other thought.
Most of my 15 or 30 l batches seem to clear much faster after the first rack
I don’t rack clear mead. It settles perfectly after a year or so, wait till laser beam goes through without any scattering, don’t agitate the bottle and give it time, mead really gets better on the long run.
Also, the more yeast you have, better is precipitation. Any rush makes imperfectly clear mead that would seem clear but would just settle in bottle later. This is a bad shortcut, don’t rake it.
Personally, I had beer sitting on its yeast cake for months (in the cooled keg though), without any issue. Also, when bottle conditioning, you’ll have some yeast sediment at the bottom, which has never hurt the flavour in my experience, even a year or so of not always cool storage.
If you leave your beverage on the yeast for years, I suppose you risk autolysis, but I’d say you’re safe for anything up to a year or so.
