A community dedicated to homebrewing beer, mead, wine, cider and everything in between. If it ferments, bring it over here.
Share recipes, ideas, ask for feedback or just advice.
Some starting points for beginners:
Quick and diry guide to fermenting fruit - cider and wine
1st time brewer:
It's been 6 hours since I added the yeast and I'm seeing lots of foaming and seperation of my pear bits from the rest of the ~~mead~~ melomel. Should I be concerned?
I don't have experience with mead/melomel. But it looks like you have too little headspace? For beer I would leave 1/3 of the vessel for headspace so the foam doesn't go through the water lock. I think the seperation is normal
The process is normal - fermentation creates carbon dioxide that rises up as bubbles once it reaches a concentration high enough to no longer dissolve in the liquid around it. Bubbles then stick to whatever they find around that can act as a nucleation site - in your case, the bits of pear - and transport the thing to the top.
The concern here is that once you get very high krausen, you'll potentially block off your airlock with bits of fruit and cause a small geyser as the pressure builds up and your cork pops off. Do try and monitor it to make sure that does not happen. You could replace the airlock with a blow-off tube that has a bigger diameter - just seal one end to the bottle (you'd normally use a rubber bung of adequate diameter and run the tubing through it) and put the other end in a jar of water. This way, you also have an airlock but any misbehaving bits of fruit can just end up in the jar via tube.