Yeast For Mead Making?

[buxton brewer]

Gday Fellow brewers, Would like to know if i could use yeast that came with kit beer to make a mead? the recipie i have calls for bread yeast (yes i know, but it is an old recipie) so will the beer yeast be ok? any feedback would be welcome. Cheers, bbrewer :icon_cheers:

 

[dgilks]

I will give you the advice that Brewer Pete gives everyone who asks about making their first mead. Follow the recipe. The recipe you have is designed for a certain yeast and other yeasts may not work well. In particular, beer yeasts are notorious for making "twangy" meads. The bread yeast will be fine and it isn't expensive.

 

[Gorey]

I used champagne yeast for my last batch of mead. It has a higher alcohol tolerance and ferments to about 12 or 15%, maybe a bit higher. My mead turned out quite dry. I'm not sure about bread yeast but I think I read somewhere that it has a fairly high tolerance also (hence its use in mead).
My guess would be that beer yeast would not ferment as much sugar as bread/baker's yeast would before succumbing to the alcohol content, so the mead would be sweeter (more unfermented sugar) and less alcoholic.

 

[Wolfy]

The most famous mead recipe that calls for bread-yeast is JAO, unfortunately it was designed for using a specific bread-yeast found in the USA, if you can find that yeast, by all means use it, if not I'd suggest that a specialty yeast would give a better result.
You could use the beer-yeast and it would probably work just as well as the bread-yeast, maybe better, but even then there may be better yeasts you could easily select.

 

[Airgead]

Your best results will be with wine yeasts. Mead is honey wine (unless you are making a beer style mead with malt and hops) so a good white wine yeast will work well. If you add a lot of fruit you can use a red wine yeast.

the problem with baker's yeast is that it is an unknown quantity. Every manufacturer will be using a different strain and the strains are not necessarily consistent from batch to batch or year to year. JAO uses one particular bread yeast available in the US. Whether the bread yeasts available out gere will perform the same is unknown 9though there is much discussion in the non-beer brewing section under the JAO thread).

I'd play safe and get some white wine yeast from your LHBS.

Oh.. and come join us in the non-beer section. We don't bite...

Cheers
Dave