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First mead-stalled?

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VonBrucen

NewBee
Registered Member
Apr 3, 2014
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Hello,
I just started making my first mead a month ago

12 lbs local raw desert honey
handful raisins
3 gal springwater
Wyeast 4184 sweet mead + nutrient activator
no heat

OG was 1.11 (did I start out a little too high?)
I added the raisins after a week and 2 weeks in was most active bubbling. 4 weeks later most bubbling had subsided (besides very tiny barely visible bubbles) and today I racked into carboy. gravity reading was 1.06. Did I rack too early? At what point would the mead be safe to bottle? Should I shoot for a FG of 1.01? I am not concerned with clarity/filtering, I want to avoid using any chemicals, and I like sweet meads. I don't want any bottle bombs though. I tried some of the mead when I was racking- it tasted great!
Thanks for your help,
Bruce
 
If you don't wanna use any stabilizing chemicals, time and cold crashing / racking would be your friend. Still does not guarantee no bottle bombs however. Time wise you'd want a good deal of it in order to ensure as much yeast as possible has dropped out or died (a year?) really I would stabilize it just to be safe


Sent from The Age of Legends, trapped inside a Stasis Box
 
1.06 is very high. I would aim for 1.02 or lower as a sweet mead myself. Getting your mead consistently to exactly that sweetness would be difficult especially without back sweetening. As moridin said there are no guarantees of safe bottles without stabilising, although I know of people who bottle rather safely when their wine (does mead behave differntly?) is completely dry.
It seems your mead might also be stalling. There could be many reasons for this such as bad aeration practices, low yeast count (expired yeast, not making a good yeast starter, shocking the yeast..). I would personally try adding more chopped raisins as you will probably need a lot of those to substitute nutrients. Hopefully your yeast is not already dormant and could pick up again.
However, I am afraid you will need to give a more detailed explanation of your method and various readings for better answers.
In my opinion starting making mead the non-chemical route is a rocky road especially if you are not trying the JAO or BOMM recipes (I also saw some natural BOMM recipes on this site).
 
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