2020 First Harvest Auxerrois---Part 3

We harvested our Auxerrois on September 17, 2020 and I wrote about it in 2020 First Harvest Auxerrois---Part 1, followed up by 2020 First Harvest Auxerrois---Part 2, which detailed the pressing and information on the Brix, pH and TA. On September 21, 2020 we went to Jonathan Edwards to rack the juice and kick off the fermentation.
The first thing was to transfer the cold settled juice from the settling tanks into the fermentation tanks.

Since we don't add any yeast food (such as diammonium phosphate---DAP), but rely on the lees to provide the necessary nutrition, it was up to us to determine when to cut the transfer. We did this by eye, looking at when the clarified juice became more like light lees in color before becoming decidedly browner indicating the beginning of the heavy lees. We feel that this change of color goes from being relatively yellow-brown to a pressed cider color. We stopped both transfers at this color point and felt that 60 gallons went from the settling tank into each of the two fermentation tanks. We took the temperature of the juice and it was at 57 degrees F. In the photo below, you can see that the heaviest of lees constituted less than half a gallon from the original approimately 67.5 gallons of cold settled Auxerrois juice.

The moderate lees were put into one of the barrels and as Jonathan Edwards explained, will be a fun experiment to ferment. This barrel might contain around 10 gallons of juice with moderately heavy lees.
After the transfer, we rehydrated the yeast, in our case QA23 and tempered the rehydrated yeast with 1000 mL of the Auxerrois juice.

The fermentation was kicked off at 5:30 p.m. on Monday, September 21, 2020.