Noob Mead Makers Wanted - Apply Within

[pdilley]

Ot:

Any woe on the Kojikin hunt at the local Asian markets?
Same thing used to make fresh miso pastes so should be findable eventually to brew some mad high quality home sake.
I've also a fermentable foods around the world book on order with the Compleat Meadmaker book. Krauts to Kimchi to Cheeses and all those strange Asian patte looking things to Indian an middle eastern goodies even more Ginger beer recipes in there as well. Hope to make some good eats to go with all the fermented nectars I've cooked up and plan to brew in the next few months.

 

[Tao]

On the subject of books related to mead i would personally buy anything i could on wine making (i own 'Making Good Wine' & 'From Vines to Wines'). When it comes to wine making you keep everything cool to preserve as much aroma as possible. If you think you might end up with bacteria in your mead use potassium metabisulfate (SP) or heat and cool the must as quickly as possible maybe a mod on a counter flow chiller. Also you get some fantastic advice and recipes from becoming a GotMead patron. You learn a heap about oaking/yest selection and the like from reading that forum, as well as nice bits of kit to have (different bottler for wine bottles, it's anoyting to fill them from the bottom). Oh and anouther handy bit of kit is a stainless steel lees stirer riged up to a drill, it mixes in honey a treat.

 

[pdilley]

great information Tao, cheers for that. I've heard of the drill on a radio interview and had quite a few visuals imagining what that would look like. Don't have any wine books n order, for some reason wasn't into wines much, never have been so far though I may have to change my mind future. Just got beer, mead, and fermentable foods books shipping over.

 

[Airgead]

OK first braggott tasting

View attachment 25828

2 kg Maris Otter



3kg ALDI honey (6 jars0

US 05 fermented at 20 degrees

The more honey as a % of fermentables the longer it takes to mature. My normal Braggot is 50/50 and is usually hitting its straps at around 3-4 months. Even an 80/20 takes a month at least.

Cheers
Dave

 

[KingPython]

I used dextrose and honey (cheating). It's drinkable right now but I'm scared to leave it mature in case it becomes too dry or astrigent.

 

[Chad]

Attached is my mead recipe sheet (Excel file) that I created which I thought I would share if others find it of any use. I have left my most recent batch filled in so you can see how it works, not that it's that hard .
It doesn't do any calcs for you, I use the fantastic GotMead online calculator for that.

View attachment template.xls

 

[pdilley]

Attached is my mead recipe sheet (Excel file) that I created which I thought I would share if others find it of any use. I have left my most recent batch filled in so you can see how it works, not that it's that hard .
It doesn't do any calcs for you, I use the fantastic GotMead online calculator for that.

I'll have to have a look at it. I've always told myself if I had the time I'd write my own Mead brewing program, probably in Python and pick a GUI module that lets it be cross-platform so the same program runs on Linux, Mac OS X, and even Windows.

 

[pdilley]

Ok I should have the last of my gear ready.

60 liter fermenter for brewing out 34 liter batches of mead.


Also in there is my AC Triac Fan Controller for controlling my AC 230Volt 50Hz fan that will be the motor of my magnetic stir plate... and a nice stirrer to oxygenate.

On top is diammonium phosphate, with the Fermaid-K equivalent in the fridge.

All I need to do now is just calibrate the refractometer and then just get too it!

 

[kevin_smevin]

Hi All.

I was hoping to give mead making a try sometime soon but i have a question. I am planning to make a medium sweet mead with a single honey. I hope to make half straight up just fermented honey, then with the other half age with some oak chips for a couple of weeks. I was hoping to make half still and half sparkling for the wooded and unwooded. I dont know if that is too ambitious or not but i thought it would be a good experiment to see what differences i would notice and what i like best.

I'm going to be using Wyeast 4148 sweet mead yeast. It has an alcohol tolerance of 11% alc. If i'm going to make half of it sparkling i need to make sure that the yeast stops fermenting due to a lack of fermentables, rather then high alcohol concentrations because it will need to be able to ferment the priming sugar to carbonate my sparkling. So basically i want to know if there is any way to figure out how much my honey will ferment out. If i can figure out what my approximate final gravity will be, i can figure out how much honey to add so i dont create too much alcohol for my yeast. I have a bunch of orange blossom honey and stringy bark honey if that makes any difference. Any help much appreciated.

Cheers

 

[davewaldo]

Hi Yum Yum,

For a first mead it certainly sounds ambitious! But if your keen, and do your research you might be fine.

I can see one major problem with your method. With mead (or wine) if you want a sweet or semi-sweet end product you need to either take the yeast to its alc limit and ensure there is still sugars left, or ferment to your desired alc % then "kill" the yeast with Sulphite and Sorbate, then add more honey.

As you can see, neither of these methods will allow you to carbonate using bottle conditioning. You can only make a dry mead with bottle conditioning. Don't be fooled by the name of the yeast, its only called "sweet" mead yeast because its easier to create a sweet result because of its lower alc tolerance.

So if you want it sparkling and sweet you will need to force carbonate using kegs or something similar.

As for your plans to split batches and do multiple experiments.... GO FOR IT!!!! Its a great way to learn.

When it comes to Oak, I prefer cubes or staves compared to chips. Craft Brewer sells staves I noticed, as does G&G. Cubes/staves have a longer contact time and give more multi-dimentional flavours.

To figure out how much honey is needed to get to a certain gravity, use the Got Mead Calculator (on left menu). This site is great for researching mead making too.

Make sure you tell us how your experiment turns out! Good luck.

Dave.

 

[kevin_smevin]

Thanks for the info. Great help.

The wyeast description of the sweet mead yeast says it will leave 2-3% residual sugars. I assumed that meant it did not attenuate as much as another strain might, thus leaving behind 2-3% of the sugars it is not able to ferment. From what your saying, sweet meads are only sweet because you add more honey/sugar then the yeast can ferment (or stopping it with camden tablets etc), stopping fermentation before all sugar is consumed and thus leaving a residual sweetness.

So basically i want to know what the story is with the 2-3% residual sugar quoted on the wyeast site for the strain 4184. Anyone used it before?

Thanks

 

[davewaldo]

hmmm, that is true, it may attenuate less (but mead has far less complex sugars to help this along), but I think it will still be quite dry, just not bone dry. Having not used this yeast though I can't speak from personal experience.

But I don't think thats much of a problem. Dry mead is YUM too!

I say just go for it, if it ends up a bit dryer than you like, you can always add more honey and not carbonate.

 

[kevin_smevin]

True. I might just go ahead and see how i go. If its too dry i'll just add more honey.

Thanks for your help. Much appreciated.

 

[davewaldo]

I'm just thinking out loud here... but... and its a bit dodgy...

You could always aim for 12-13% or more alc and then bottle when the fermentation seems to slow down. But bottle in PET bottles incase you get bombs.

This way your yeast will die out from too much alcohol at around 11% but the last bit of fermentation will carbonate for you. The benefit of PET bottles is that you can purge the bottles easily if they start to over carb by loosening the screw caps (also you can tell they are over carbing by squeezing them). Also you won't get dangerous bottle bombs, just messy ones....

This is quite dodgy and isn't ideal, but if you are VERY keen on a sparkling and sweet mead, it might be your only easy way.

 

[pdilley]

Just myself musing here to myself. I would ferment out dry with an 18% ABV range yeast (Already using Vintners Harvest SN9 for that). Then you can rack off and kill off the fermentation and back sweeten one with honey, that will give you more honey flavours and aromas. The other you can clear out in the secondary, bottle and go sparkling dry champagne style in the bottle.

If you have more secondary vessels to rack into, then also consider racking onto fruits or spices in the secondary as an option as well. Using hightest methods its normally a straight mead in the primary and all the additional flavours and tweaking done in the secondary.

Cheers,
Brewer Pete

 

[Ronin]

I'm just thinking out loud here... but... and its a bit dodgy...

You could always aim for 12-13% or more alc and then bottle when the fermentation seems to slow down. But bottle in PET bottles incase you get bombs.

This way your yeast will die out from too much alcohol at around 11% but the last bit of fermentation will carbonate for you. The benefit of PET bottles is that you can purge the bottles easily if they start to over carb by loosening the screw caps (also you can tell they are over carbing by squeezing them). Also you won't get dangerous bottle bombs, just messy ones....

This is quite dodgy and isn't ideal, but if you are VERY keen on a sparkling and sweet mead, it might be your only easy way.

That may work, from what I've read to get mead sparkling the pressure has to be much, much higher than beer. I'm assuming to get this pressure it'll take more priming sugar, or as you say you may be able to bottle it before the end of fermentation.

Either way I'm excited, I just got my dry mead yeast today and have 12kg of honey at home ready to go...only problem is I'm going overseas for 4 weeks in 2 days time. Not that a 4 wekk holiday is a chore, but I've been waiting ages to start mead, and all my fermenters are tied up with lagers while I'm away.

Oh well, just have to wait till I get back.

 

[pdilley]

If you are not lactose intolerant, back sweeten with that and let the residual yeast carbonate in the bottle. They won't ferment the lactose.

 

[kevin_smevin]

Not a bad idea about the lactose brewer Pete. Will look into that for sure. I'll let you all know how it goes and a couple months or so when everything is finished fermenting and settling out.

 

[brettprevans]

anyone in melb intertested in getting some lelvin yeasts for mead from winemaker? split postage will make things a bit cheaper.

alternatively happy to split yeast costs also ie. i recieve yeasts, make some starters and we split the price.

 

[brettprevans]

Attached is my mead recipe sheet (Excel file) that I created which I thought I would share if others find it of any use. I have left my most recent batch filled in so you can see how it works, not that it's that hard .
It doesn't do any calcs for you, I use the fantastic GotMead online calculator for that.

great template there chad. funny you've got brandy down as an ingredient. i was laying in bed the other night thinking that some added brandy would be nice to a mead.