New to meads

[mikeyjayjay]

Hi all,

Just checking my numbers and recipe. I want a very sweet mead and plan to backsweeten with fruit/honey after initial fermentation. I will be starting 2 x 1gal batches. One wil be apple cinnamon and one will be strawberry.

1 gal total volume
3 pounds honey
OG 1.108

Yeast started with Goferm.

Nutrient protocol TOSNA 2.0 with Fermaid O

Once the ferment is over Ill stabilize the meads before starting to backsweeten.

I would like some help with the backsweeten.

I would like a very sweet to sweet final product. How many apples / cinnamon do I need to add and how many strawberries do I need to add. I would also like a good taste of honey so I guess I need to add some honey too.

Any suggestions would be great!




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[Dadux]

Apples usually contribute quite a lot of acidity. pick red or yellow if you dont want the biting flavour. Honey, depends on taste. Some people consider 1.020-1.030 very sweet, but i have done up to 1.070. I recommend you start with something like 1.010-15 and then build up. You shoudnt add fruit to both batches probably. keep 1 without fruit so you can see what honey tastes like. If its good honey you will like it.

Strawberries are a mess. be careful. they break apart easily will leave the mead clouded and soak a lot too. Personally im not a fan of fruit in my mead. for a very strong strawberry taste, 1kg/5 liters of mead would do. Cinnamon, 1-2 sticks (start with 1) for 5l. Apples depends. you can use apple juice. Or whole apples but the taste is different. 1kg of apples for 5l is good too. You can add more though. But if they are sour it will make the mead feel less sweet.

Important: when you add fruit they have water and raise the volume of your mix. If you stabilized for X litters then add 2kg of strawberries thats x+2 liters. if you are not careful with this your yeast will restart the fermentation. Monitor your mead after adding any adjuncts that take up a lot of volume.

For adding fruit. Its best to freeze it first, then thaw it and then add it. Freeze/thaw cycles help break cell walls and release the flavour of the fruit.
If you add peels make sure to rinse them.

 

[bernardsmith]

hi mikeyjayjay - and welcome. I am speaking only for myself - others may have a very different opinion, but I would not use fruit to backsweeten. My approach would be to use the fruit to flavor the mead and then use more concentrated sweetener (honey or table sugar, for example) to back sweeten. But another option is to step feed your mead with honey so that as the gravity drops to around 1.000 you add a quantity of honey to raise the gravity another 20 points (a scant half pound per gallon) and you repeat this each time the gravity drops to 1.000. What happens is that you force the yeast to reach its maximum tolerance for alcohol and at that point the yeast cannot ferment any more sugar. . This is not "back sweetening"... but you don't have much control over the final ABV so you can make a mead with a great deal more alcohol than you want...
That said, I would still stabilize this mead as over time there may be enough cells of yeast whose tolerance is greater than the average and over time those cells may replicate and eventually number enough for them to restart the fermentation.