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Wildkatt

NewBee
Registered Member
Jul 10, 2014
11
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colorado
OK my wife is a bee keeper. Of course im allergic to bees (dont Figger) But i suit up and help with the heavy lifting. Up until now have been using honey for cooking and so on. Now i want to make me some mead so im looking for Sweet mead recipes haven't decided whether im doing a 1 gal. brew or a 3 gal. brew but i have honey and equipment and the complete Mead makers book. so any info is going to be helpful. I think my bigest boogle is yeast. what yeast is best for a sweet desert type mead. Dont like dry winey tasting mead like it thick and sweet.


Katt
 
I'm a novice but I have several batches under my belt and a whole lot of research. And I did stay at a holiday inn express once!
There's no exact yeast per se for a sweet mead. You have two options:
1) Put an amount of honey in that is greater than what the yeast can eat, thus leaving residual sweetness (unpredictable and not as reliable)
OR
2) Ferment completely dry, stabilize and add honey back to the desired sweetness level.

The second option I find is the most reliable and the one I've seen used the most. It's what several people advised me to do when I started and it's turned out just fine.

I will let those with more experience give the advice on which yeast to use.
 
Ironpapa40 said:
I'm a novice but I have several batches under my belt and a whole lot of research. And I did stay at a holiday inn express once!
There's no exact yeast per se for a sweet mead. You have two options:
1) Put an amount of honey in that is greater than what the yeast can eat, thus leaving residual sweetness (unpredictable and not as reliable)
OR
2) Ferment completely dry, stabilize and add honey back to the desired sweetness level.

The second option I find is the most reliable and the one I've seen used the most. It's what several people advised me to do when I started and it's turned out just fine.

I will let those with more experience give the advice on which yeast to use.
Click to expand...

Iron Pops got it right here. You can try adding more honey than the yeast can convert, but you may just stall earlier than you wanted and it will be too sweet. The best thing to do is ferment it dry and back-sweeten with that early spring honey (way floral!)
 
First thing you need to do is read Schramm's book. It's awesome.

Look for both JAOM and BOMM on here. And read those too.

If your goal is a sweet mead you can't go wrong with JAOM. It doesn't require any special equipment so you can get everything you need at the grocery store and it's dead simple. In 8 to 10 weeks you will have a gallon of delicious sweet mead.

Then you can move on to BOMM.


Sent from my galafreyan transdimensional communicator 100 years from now. G
 
JAOM is the Ancient Orange mead! You're already on your way! Check out the JAOM thread and compare Schramm's to this one. I don't have the book in front of me, but I think it's the same recipe.
 
thanks mannye have the book read it a couple times. Just started last nite a batch of ancient orange clove and cinnamon mead and the yeastys are hard at work and bubbling away. will let you know how it turns out. Gona start a batch of BOMM or JAOM next.

Katt
 
Instead of adding all the honey at the beginning or back sweetening, you could also try step feeding. That's what I did with my first batch to make it a little sweeter. It worked really well.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
Also, you might consider making a bochet. For this type of mead, you caramelize some of the sugars in the honey and those sugars become unfermentable. So it leaves a lot of residual sugars too


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I haven't step fed a mead to the point of the yeasties giving up, yet... I have a 1 gallon test batch with K1V that has had 3 honey additions and is currently chugging away very sssssllllllloooooooooooowwwwwwwwwwwwwwwllllllyyyyyyy at a current ABV of 19.4% and climbing. The K1V is because we live in a 101 year old house with no AC, so my kitchen got to 83ºF today, and K1V can handle that heat. So step feeding is a good option, it just takes time, patience, and someplace to let it do it's thing, with occasional (twice monthly for me) monitoring.

Welcome, good luck! And ask questions, the people on this board are great!!
 
Making your mead to a specific alcohol content, chemically stabilizing it and then backsweetening is probably the most reliable way to get predictable results.

Front-loading with a lot of honey may lead to incomplete or slow fermentation. With the exception of Joe's Ancient Orange. That's an always-do, in my books. My blackberry variation kicks a lot of ass too.

I've done the step-feed to death routine several times and I like it, but it does take time and attention. I figure out how sweet I want it and every time the SG goes 0.010 under that, I add enough honey to bring it back up to where I like it (usually 1.015 for my tastes), repeat until it stops.

Botchet is on my list, I want to see how much unfermentable sugar I can get with this method :)
 
OK so far so good toped it off and the Yeasies still working away. How hard would it to make ancient vanilla mead without the oranges. Just a noob question.


Katt
 
Wildkatt said:
OK so far so good toped it off and the Yeasies still working away. How hard would it to make ancient vanilla mead without the oranges. Just a noob question.


Katt
Click to expand...

It might be a little more difficult in relation to JAOM becaue the ingredients in JAOM are meant to balance each other. That's not to say an ancient vanilla mead can't be made, just that you would be diving right into advanced territory. Nothing wrong with that! Keep in mind that you won't know if you did everything right for at least a year.
 
I've made a lot of Ancient mead variants and you do need some amount of acid. Now, if you used the juice from a lemon without using the pith or the zest, you'd get the acidity without the flavour, maybe that would work.

The one time I added a vanilla bean to a standard gallon of JAO I hated it for the first year but it mellowed out really nicely.
 
You might also be interested is a Polish style mead, they start off with about 33% honey and a very strong yeast. Since your wife is a beekeeper she has honey in the comb, using the honey in the comb and just mashing it up in the fermentation bucket add a touch of everything like pollen and propolis and wax from the hive adding a little depth of flavor, especially if she drops a few drone larva in there for nitrogen. WVMJ
 
Mite have to try that. Well its been 3 weeks since i started this adventure lol the yeasties have prety much stoped but still not clearing yet. hope all is well still got a couple weeks b4 i start to worry lol


Katt
 
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