I plan to do a full write-up about this mead and brew once I go through the backsweetening/balancing process, but I thought this was interesting enough to share as is.
The plan was to make a low ABV, quick turnaround strawberry lemonade mead to have on tap for the summer. For a ~6.5 gallon batch I used a full pallet of strawberries juiced into 7.14lbs of juice, and 9.68lbs of honey (really just the rest of the honey in the bucket). Low starting OG of 1.057 which fermented down to 0.994 in 11 days.
I wanted to see if the combo of low ABV and aggressive filtering would let me skip out on any of the aging process.
Before it'd even fully finished blubbing, I ran it through a series plate/disk filters. The image shows, from left to right, Original -> Clarifying (5-7um) -> Polishing (1-2um) -> Semi-Sterilizing (~0.5um).
Taste at each stage: Undrinkable -> Bad -> Pretty Good -> Shockingly Clean
Most of the strawberry flavor was sadly left behind, but I think that was true even before the filtering. Left with a nice strawberry aroma and a hint of the taste in a very smooth, if lacking in depth and complexity, mead.
My conclusions from this is that filtering bypasses the "suck less" part of aging, where off flavors are removed, but (obvious in retrospect) does nothing to build character and complexity.
I now plan to backsweeten using a batch of lemon oleo saccharum I made, sour it with citric acid, and potentially add some strawberry concentrate to bump up the strawberry flavor. I'll bottle some to see how actual aging treats it, and put the rest on tap to enjoy this summer.
I used Lalvin 71b, and a couple days after pitching it occurred to me that this would have been a great opportunity to use something more suited to purpose.
Honestly different yeasts is something I haven't really dug into much yet, although I want to. Currently I just have a big stash of 71b and default to that for every mead.