Hey, this is Manmade Mead. Today we are going to be talking about degassing your mead, something that whenever I first started I didn't know much about it, I don't really feel like I was super comfortable with it at the time. So I have some notes here as I normally do. I will put them down in the description so you can take the link and read them along with me. I just want to be as accurate as possible. So degassing is something that when I started making another idea about I simply thought you just put together your ingredients and let it go and it's kind of silly. Unfortunately it's not that easy. We have to ensure our mead will complete two perfection by bathing it in a sort of way. As the mead goes through the primary fermentation the yeast will use the oxygen from the mead and turn it into CO2. This CO2 oftentimes will make its way out of the mead through the airlock during the primary and secondary fermentation stages. However that doesn't always get all of the CO2 out. There's a clear difference between degassing and oxygenating the mead, the oxygenation process happens when you first start your mead. So when you first have the must and it's going to the primary stage. You want to give the yeast plenty of oxygen to feed on and use their fermentation, use for their fermentation process. However after that fermentation process is over you really don't want any more oxygen in there and you left over the yeast we'll use the oxygen and turn it into CO2 which after a certain point it's hard to deal with. So an easy way to degaster mead is to stir it in its container or lightly swirl it in your carboy. Some people will simply use a wooden spoon or to stir or they might have a tool like a long, it's a short picture of it. It's a long metal pole with paddles on the end and you can connect it to a drill. It's pretty cool, something I don't have, it'd be cool to have in the future. A tool like this is great for degassing large amounts of mead as stirring can be strenuous for those large quantities. When you are stirring the mead you need to look and see if there are any bubbles appearing on the side of the container. If you see these bubbles that means that some CO2 is leaving the mead. You might also see bubbles rising from the mead itself. This means that your process is working and you should continue to do this until the bubbles slow down to almost a halt. This will help rid the mead of CO2. One other way people like to degast is by using a wine saver what it is. It's basically a vacuum for wine. Once you open a wine and you don't drink it all and then we want to store it again. You put this thing in and it will create a vacuum and pull out the oxygen and the CO2 out of that. People use this for mead and they'll put it on top and then just use the vacuum side of things and then actually pull that CO2 out of the mead. That's probably the most effective way to do it. The wine saver is cheap, maybe about $10. You can do it on a glass carboy. There are ways to do it on fermentation buckets. You can do it with anything. Something like that creating that vacuum will pull out all of that CO2 which is great. It's important that you degast your mead because if there's too much CO2 that can be problems with bottling and storing for long periods of time. The CO2 store the mead will create pressure and then could cause explosions in the future. Now some people do like a little bit of carbonation in their mead. I'll find some bubbling out of people don't. That's part of the preference. If you don't like any carbonation in your mead then you need to try degast it. If you're okay with a little bit of that CO2 in there that's fine just leave it as it is. I highly recommend that you keep your air locks on the mead as long as possible because this will act as a natural degassing tool. Degassing your mead is something that you have to monitor yourself. A lot of people will ask how often do I degast my mead and the truth is there's no perfect answer. The short answer is that you need to try to degast it yourself and see the results. If there's a lot of bubbling occurring after you've done it then you probably need to do it more or make sure that it's all gone. If there's light bubbling then most of that CO2 is probably gone. You're probably okay. Once you've completed the degassing stage you should let the mead sit for about another 8 to 12 weeks and just let sit. Don't do anything else because the mead can get flat after degassing and it might need some time to to kind of recover. Just like in wine this is super similar. Wine and mead are really close to each other in the grand scheme of things and so watching out for those things is important. So to wrap all of this up in short you may be in the video but I'll give you this short of it. The degassing should be done after the fermentation process. You can stir, swirl or use a wine saver to pull off the CO2 out of the mead. You will know this is working by washing to see if bubbles are forming as you're doing one of these methods. Do this as many times as it takes for the CO2 to make its way out of the mead before storing it for a long time. If you don't do this you can create a problem for yourself in the future when you bottle and let it sit for a long time. Ultimately like I said I didn't know much about this when I first started it is important it can affect your mead's flavor and it's not hard. Don't assume like myself like I did that you're just going to start the process and then let it go and it's just going to happen. You kind of have to do some things and I think that's just part of making mead making alcohol making all these different things. So I hope this made sense to you guys like I said all these notes are down in the description if you just want to read them and there are a bunch of other ones I have a whole bunch of other videos regarding all the different steps to take in mead and all the important things. So if you like this video leave me a comment suggestion for other videos like this I'll do my research I love going through this stuff it helps me out to figure out what I'm doing further but also I think it's fun to make these videos for you guys. So thank you for watching leave a like subscribe everything I would love to see this channel continue to grow and continue to see you guys be involved. So I will see you guys next time. Cheers! so