mead and a question about basic recipes and techniques published online

[BernardSmith]

I have been making fruit wines for two or three years and have made a couple of batches of mead. I am planning on making a batch of mead that is bittered with hops and then bottled with some additional honey or sugar to carbonate much like beer. OK... When I review material published on line (even material recently published so the only yeasts available were not simply bread yeasts with low tolerance for alcohol but were good wine making yeasts) mead makers routinely claim that the more honey you have in the must the sweeter the mead will be. That claim seems to me to be counter-intutive. The more honey per gallon the greater will be the ABV and the mead won't be any "sweeter" assuming we ferment to dry. Now some of these mead makers seem very experienced and so I am trying to make sense of their statements. Are they suggesting that if we add more honey the mead will have more of a honey "nose" and flavor or do they really mean that all other things being equal a must with 4 lbs of honey per gallon will literally be SWEETER than a must with 3 lbs of honey per gallon. None of their recipes or discussions suggest that we stop the fermentation before it has fully fermented. Am I missing something?

 

[Deezil]

What they're normally suggesting is that they dont use a hydrometer, dont use sorbate & dont use high-ABV yeast like 1118.

Honey..... It's almost devoid of nutrients for yeast. As far as yeast are concerned its basically sugar, made of more-complex sugars than white table sugar.

'Traditional' ferments, where all people add are honey, water and yeast (thats it), take for-EVER to ferment because the yeast dont have enough nutrients to build up numbers and chug through the sugar, which being more complex, takes more effort by the yeast, to break down.

You could test the SG-difference by dissolving 3lbs of honey into 1 gallon of water, then measure - then dissolve another pound of honey & watch the SG jump.

3lbs should come in around 1.075 - 1.090, depending on the honey itself.
Add another pound and you're over 1.100 for sure, maybe as high as 1.120

That pound of honey is a 5% ABV-spread, about.
Having a 1.100 - 1.120 SG, and using a 12-14% ABV yeast can leave you anything from dry to sweet. It's a crap-shoot.

How far the yeast really makes it, has a lot to do with your nutrient schedule and temp.

What I would suggest, is you make mead the same way you make wine.
Shoot for your starting SG, ferment dry, and backsweeten.

You can follow that anti-hydrometer advice, but you run the same bottle-bomb risk as you do with wine.. Except honey is more expensive

 

[GreginND]

I think Manley has hist the nail on the head. Most of those recipes for sweeter meads are using more sugar than can be converted to alcohol by the yeast. The yeast will die off at a certain alcohol level. Personally I find this difficult to control.

The best way is to carefully measure your gravity, ferment to dry, stabilize and sweeten. Or in your case, add back a little bit of sugar to carbonate. Note that if you want that carbonated this way you will not be able to produce a sweet mead because if you add more sugar it will likely burst.

To make it sweet you need to stabilize. If stabilized you can't carbonate by fermentation.

 

[BernardSmith]

Thanks for your quick responses. Really useful information. Personally, I prefer to always ferment dry and if I think the wine needs additional sweetening to bring out more flavors then I might add a little sugar after stabilizing but both you, Greg and Manley suggest that the meadmakers I have been reading about, fly by the seat of their pants. They don't measure their starting gravity or work for a specific final gravity. That makes sense given the number of times I have read about using a range of lbs of honey per gallon rather than a suggested SG. I am aiming for an ABV of about 13 percent and so an SG of about 1.090 and so whether I will need 3 lbs per gallon or less.. or more ... will really depend on the sugar/water content of the honey itself. In other words, I will need to determine the SG of the honey I have and base the quantity /gallon on that figure rather than assume that a specific weight of honey will produce the mead I want. So, in many ways mead making is quite similar to making fruit wines except that honey is nutrient poor and it is so rich in sugars that fermentation does not occur naturally. It must be diluted first.

 

[Deezil]

3lbs of honey is about 1 quart.

I'm starting a Blackberry Melomel today, 25lbs of berries + 3 quarts / 9lbs of honey
Should make a finished 5-gallons @ ~12% ABV

Getting a proper SG reading with honey can take some patience in itself. Honey dissolves best in warm-hot water, but SG readings need to be taken at room temp. Try not to get the water above, i think it was 150F, though as you'll start to change the character of the honey (maybe it was 180F?)

Just mix the honey into half the amount of water you think you'll want/need/use, let it cool, measure it, then thin it out - since the honey is dissolved already, this part can go quicker as you can use room-temp water. Just add some and remeasure until you get the SG where you want it.

Easy making a regular mead; bit trickier when you have a fruit flavor you're trying not too over-thin

 

[BernardSmith]

Again, Thanks Manley. I came across some information on the web (different sites). If I dissolve 2 oz of honey in enough water to make 1 pt and measure the SG then that will be the same SG as a 1 lb dissolved in enough water to make 1 gallon of must. Let's say the measurement is an SG of 1.038 (or 38 points), then the amount of honey I need is determined by the following formula
A) The starting SG I want (1.090) 90 points
B) Multiplied by the total volume of mead I want to make (3 gallons)
C) Divided the specific gravity of the honey in points (say 38 (an SG of 1.038))
or (90 X 3) /38 = 7.10 lbs of honey in enough water to make 3 gallons of must.
If the honey has a lower SG then the equation tells me I will need more honey and if the SG is higher then I can get away with less honey, assuming that my starting SG of 1.090 is not anything negotiable.

The thing that I need to pay attention to is that 1 lb of honey (or sugar) dissolved in 1 gallon of water is NOT the same as 1lb of honey dissolved to make 1 gallon of must. Seven pounds plus of honey is almost a half a gallon so I would be adding not 3 gallons of water but closer to 2.5 and so the initial measurement must be 2 oz in enough water to make 1 pt , and NOT 2 oz in 1 pt of water.

 

[Deezil]

That just sounds messy

Can take 1 quart of honey & 1 quart of water - this will be astronomically high but will give you an SG that is 1/2 of the honey; if that doesnt work, add another quart and understand its 1/3 the SG of the honey

You can work it from there
Dont make it harder than it needs be

You'll also want an bit of excess anyway, because of losses from lees and such

 

[BernardSmith]

good point about the need to begin with more than 3 gallons because of the losses at racking... I will however, take under advisement your point that I am making the calculation of the amount of honey more complicated than it needs to be...

 

[fatbloke]

Deezil has it the wrong way round I understand.

Honey, water and yeast are "show" meads.

Honey, water, yeast and nutrients are considered "traditional" meads.

There are the 2 base methods i.e. pile all the honey for a desired outcome and then manage the issues as they arise - more of a beer making type technique, and the more wine making type approach where you would start at a defined gravity where the must replicates a grape must in sugar levels and then ferment it, using different yeasts to get different characteristics (sorry, I know this isn't the best of explanations)....

So, the first idea/approach, is fine when working with lower gravity start levels like beers, because they already contain non-fermentable sugars, so that when the ferment is finished, all of the fermentable sugars have been converted, but there's the underlying sweetness from the unfermentables, which shows up in the FG.

Meads aren't like that, because the start point is so much higher, yet as we know the sugars in honey are almost completely fermentable, non-fermentables making up only a tiny percentage. Hence if you wanted something of higher strength, the start gravity can be so high, as to cause problems, even as bad as osmotic shock, to the yeast, stalling or even preventing it from starting - plus some yeasts are more hardy/capable than others, so to my way of thinking, this is poor practice (which I often see over at homebrewtalk, I suspect, because of the higher numbers of people who are beer makers first and presume that you can just use the same method/technique with meads - you can, but it's much more limiting).

So, the other method which is more wine like, seems, to my way of thinking, to offer much more flexibility.

If you start, say, with 3lb of honey and make it up to 1 gallon of must (it doesn't really matter whether it's 1 US or 1 Imp gallon either, you'd just get a slightly lower gravity reading from the Imp gallon due to it's greater volume), then once the batch is fermenting, you can easily work out what the likely final strength will be from various, pretty basic, conversion charts. Because sugar of a known value, will convert to alcohol with quite a precise strength (obviously it depends on a few other factors too, but this is just using a basic example/demonstration).

Like a batch started at 1.133 OG, will, with care/correct management, finish at the presumed 1.000 level and that converts directly to 18.07% ABV. Obviously the differences between sugar containing liquid and the differences in density between alcohol hand water could provide some odd variations (hence my understanding of why the "attenuation" thing used by beer makers is useless when working out the numbers for meads).

So with something like a start gravity of 1.100, the presumed finish at 1.000 and the 100 point drop equates to 13.58% ABV, but if the ferment finished at 0.990, then it would be at 14.94% ABV.

Or when you've taken the SG to get the numbers above, if you've used a yeast that will go to 18% ABV, you have the choice of fermenting dry, then stabilising and back sweetening, or step feeding so that you get a stronger brew or even step feed it too death so that you know that you've had a total drop of however many points would equate to the tolerance of the yeast, plus some residual sugars to make the finished brew taste sweeter.

Obviously if you want carbonation, it's either got to finish with enough alcohol tolerance to be able to "bottle prime" (whether you just add extra fermentables or do the full "methode champenoise" route), or you have to think about forced carbonation and kegging.

This is basically why I suggest to people not to start too high, because that way, you have a greater choice of how you might want it too finish, or to be able to finish it........

Of course, how "easy" the ferment is, is likely to depend on the recipe, nutrients, acid/pH levels and a few other factors.

Equally, it's why it's easy to say, that IT IS easy, to make mediocre meads, but not so easy to make good/exceptional meads (yes, I know, the overly frequent use of the "E" word in the last sentence )

 

[Deezil]

Deezil has it the wrong way round I understand.

Honey, water and yeast are "show" meads.

Honey, water, yeast and nutrients are considered "traditional" meads.

Guess I do
My bad