1st Mead or Attack for the Oxygen Stone

[JakeAndBake]

How many batches have you gotten out of your bottle so far? I think I may go pick one up tomorrow, I've always wanted to oxygenate with O2 but never had the money for one of those big medical tanks.

[Chemiker]

How many batches have you gotten out of your bottle so far? I think I may go pick one up tomorrow, I've always wanted to oxygenate with O2 but never had the money for one of those big medical tanks.

So far 4. So that's $2.50 in oxygen per batch LOL. If I can get another 4 batches out of it, it'll be worth it. Otherwise I have a reusable oxygen bottle that I'll have to rig up and have refilled at Airgas, I'm sure that'll be cheaper.

Sorry for the major threadjack USMCMatt. Your mead experiment looks fun, and has inspired me to try my hand at it!

[USMCMatt]

So far I've done 6 batches on this tank, plus I use it to push water out the line after cleaning so who knows. They are $8 at Lowes or Home Depot, so just buy 2 and keep one for backup. I know several guys doing 15+ batches

Here's the low down on O2 directly from the owner of Wyeast and generally followed by any yeast company.

Shaking a carboy is pretty good but needs to be done 4-5 minutes. Doing it this way actually IS better then using an aquarium pump.

Directly adding O2 however is hands down the best way to do it. Get yourself a mini O2 tank regulator should be $65 i got mine from Northern Brewer.

30 seconds is generally considered what to do, however the secret according to the owner is the best way to use it is to let it slowly seep out of the stone and let it go for 1 full minute. Apparently you get better results from letting it run slowly through the stone as opposed to letting it run fully open.

[USMCMatt]

My JAOM has a couple weeks left to go but man out of the blue it cleared pretty good, nearly see though.

I had a bunch of stuff left over so Saturday I made a pineapple/orange and a blackberry version.

8 hours later the Blackberry was about to blow, I had to take the tip off my bottle filler and make a quick DIY blowoff system lol.

[JakeAndBake]

I ended up just buying a HEPA filter for my aquarium pump. It foams pretty bad, but I think there's some foam breaker stuff you can get that's food safe, so i might try that if I decide to oxygenate with the aquarium pump longer than an hour or so.

Those two new ones look pretty good there, man! I just did my first mead the other day, a blackberry black cherry cyser. Got two gallons fermenting now, and the ingredients ready for another two gallons. Are you doing these as sweet meads or dry meads? I kinda wanna do a pineapple mead but I don't know which would be a better way to go.

[scotchpine]

Matt, those 2 in the first pic would make awsome table centerpieces!