Mad for Mead, Part 3 (2024)

FAQs

How much yeast for 1 gallon of mead per gallon? ›

I recommend pitching 2 grams per gallon when using dry wine yeast. For best results, rehydrate with 1.25gram of Goferm per gram of yeast.

Mead may immediately begin to foam – swirl the carboy to help it dissipate.

Backsweetening is a process commonly used in mead and cider making to sweeten the finish of a fermented drink just before packaging. This is a useful technique to have in your arsenal of tricks since it is very common for meads and ciders to ferment out bone-dry, especially if they are intended to be lower in alcohol.

Stirring twice a day is generally sufficient (if you have a fast fermentation, you might want to stir three or four times a day). Stirring does a couple of things: It blows off carbon dioxide, which lowers potential yeast stress, and it adds oxygen to your mead when the yeast can use it best.

If you simply added yeast to honey, it won't ferment. There's just TOO much for the yeast and they could even die. That's part of why honey doesn't spoil, the concentration of sugar is too high. Similar can be said for table sugar.

Campden tablets are made of sodium metabisulphite, an additive that kills yeast and bacteria. Sulphites are commonly used in wine and cider production. Simply dissolve your honey and tablets in a small volume of hot water, and pour as much as you like into your mead.

In the fermentation bible, The Art of Fermentation, Sandor Katz suggests stirring the mead to create a vortex in one direction, then in the other. This aerates the mead-in-progress, which helps spur yeast growth. Opening the jar daily—burping it—also releases built-up carbon-dioxide.

Shaking your mead also helps to introduce oxygen, a process known as aeration, that is much need during the first 72 hours (but only the first 72 hours) of fermentation.

Mead usually stays cloudy due to suspended particles that resulted from chemical reactions during fermentation.

There is no practical way to experience this without allowing the mead to age. And like Bliss, Solifaction will go through the same process. Smoothing out, over time, to make a mellow, less dry experience, letting the latent sweetness emerge.

What can I add to mead to make it taste better? ›

However, if your goal is to have a stronger flavor, or even to not have your mead taste as dry, using a technique known as backsweetening can help. This technique usually is done to add a certain amount of sugar, usually honey since it's a honey wine, to increase the color, gravity, and ultimately, flavor of the drink.

Maturing mead over time enables desirable flavors to meld and evolve, allowing harsh flavors to diminish. The Mead maker can age before bottling in carboys, barrels, or bottles. Consumers may age in the bottle. Commercially made meads are generally ready to be enjoyed when released.

You also want to push the fruit down twice a day (called punching down the fruit cap) as you don't want the floating fruit to dry out or spoil. Remove the fruit bag after about 7–14 days, or rack the mead away from the fruit to a second fermenter. Leaving the fruit in too long can result in flavor and haze issues.

Mead, unlike beer, benefits from degassing during fermentation. Honey, being largely composed of sugar, can ferment very rapidly in the first stages of fermentation and build up a significant amount of CO2 in the form of carbonic acid. This carbonic acid can slow fermentation.

Some traditional meads and darker meads have plenty in common with full-bodied red wines. They're both packed full of flavour, derived from natural ingredients, and feature the kind of volatile aroma compounds that can really benefit from a few minutes of 'breathing' in the glass or via the open neck of your bottle.

Typical usage rate for yeast is 1 gm / gallon of juice, but being a little short or a little long is not a problem, as yeast reproduces to reach a number at which fermentation takes place. Being slightly long on usage amount simply gets the fermentation count up that much faster.

Thus, while the 1 gram of yeast per 1 gallon of must is an ideal ratio, you also want to be sure you're using reliable equipment to measure your cell count and your viability. Of course, at home, going over or under by a bit won't make much of a difference as yeast reproduce to ferment at a steady rate.

You gave that batch nutrients at the beginning, so right now, you may benefit from some yeast hulls to bind potential toxins. About 0.5-1 gram per gallon of yeast hulls would be plenty. If you want to use boiled yeast, I'd probably go with 2 grams per gallon as you'll be getting more than just the hulls.

A common rule of thumb is to limit the addition of these products to no more that 2 g/gal (2 g/3.8 L) of wine or must.