OG on the lowish side?

[gx1990k]

I just started a sugar-honey based mead-like wine batch with following specs:

Into a 6-gallon carboy

-3kg of sugar that was inverted using 1g/kg of citric acid
-1.5kg of honey
-250g of raisins
-4 lemons
-30 grams of dry wine yeast(store brand, exact type unknown), rehydrated per instructions
- balance of water

The resulting OG is 1.0675. My goal is to make 12-14% that is dry and backsweeten it before bottling. The measured OG dictates I should add more sugars to properly reach that range. Would just dumping more honey into the fermenter cause issues with the yeast?

 

[darigoni]

I'm always amazed when someone's first post is asking for help, after they've started their first batch and mucked things up. It's much easier to fix something before you pitch your yeast.

Sugar?

No, adding honey after it's fermenting, is not a problem. In fact there's a process, called "step feeding", where you keep adding honey, until the yeast get tired and stop fermenting.

You really need to add some nutrients (raisins are not nutrients).

Do some reading about Modern Mead making: read the gotmead Newbee guide, watching the 9 episode Meadology series on YouTube and listen to the gotmead podcasts starting one Sept 5th 2017, on modern mead making.

 

[Chevette Girl]

Mostly what darigoni said, but congrats on having a hydrometer when you're just starting out. I will add though, while adding lemon may be a standard procedure if you come from a fruit wine making background, it often doesn't work out so well when honey is involved because honey has its own acidity that sugar doesn't have. You'll find when you read the Newbee Guide that yeast doesn't like too much acidity.

Also, I don't know where you read that you need to invert your sugar, but you don't need to. The yeast can figure out how to eat the sugar without that kind of help. And the citric acid will add to the acidity problems, same as the lemons.

If you want lemon flavour, use just the zest.

Raisins will add a bit of flavour and some body or mouthfeel, but not a lot else, I generally only bother using them when I'm using fruit that comes out really thin-tasting, like pears, other than that, I find they're not really worth the trouble.

You might consider sort of shelving this one as an early learning experience, leaving it at a lower SG will make it easier for the fermentation to finish with the added acidity and the lack of nutrients. If you're going to keep trying with this recipe to get it up to 12%, may I direct your attention to the GotMead Batch Calculator? You should be able to use that to figure out how much more honey to add to get it to your desired alcohol concentration. I would warn though, that not knowing what kind of yeast you've got does make it difficult to know whether you're going to get that to go dry. Maybe ask your brew store if they can tell you the source of the yeast they're repackaging?

I would suggest doing a little research and trying one of the traditional mead recipes, using a recommended yeast, a calculated amount of honey, and recommended yeast nutrients and energizer. If you're not sure about a recipe, post it here before you start and we can tell you what to expect...

In general though, if a recipe calls for sugar, raisins and/or lemons, keep looking, that is NOT a modern mead recipe.

 

[Squatchy]

What Chevette girls said. And . Sugar isn't good in a mead. It contributes nothing. Use honey instead.

 

[Stasis]

Way too much sugar. You used 3kgs of sugar and 1.5kgs honey. It doesn't matter how good the quality of honey is, it's not going to be really tasted in the final product. Sometimes I'd preach to new mead makers about the importance of buying honey from your beekeeper rather than some cheap supermarket honey but it wouldn't even make a difference here. The other ingredients will also have little effect so this will be mostly fermented sugar which is cheap alcohol.
Sugar is used mostly in wine making when you use a fruit and add no water and your final gravity would result in a very low abv drink. In order to boost the abv a bit you might want to add sugar and this might be desirable since more abv means better protection against infection and stronger booze. In winemaking this is called chaptalization and if you go professional it's often frowned upon. Since in mead making we're adding sugar in the form of honey and we can add as much of it as we want, the great majority of us would rather add more honey than sugar. There is some merit to adding brown sugar or molasses in very specific recipes but I have personally never been in a situation where I wanted to add sugar.
Sorry for the long explanation but don't worry.. I was also very tempted to use sugar when I first started out and I bet some of us here used sugar too even if we won't admit it

 

[Toxxyc]

I would also say "too much sugar". I recently made a honey-sugar mead, but my process was swapped around. I used 1kg dextrose and 2.375kg of honey in a 3.3 gallon batch, and even with the slightly lower addition of sugars I found that it made an impact in the "volume" of the mead, so to speak. It worked wonderfully with the mead backsweetened with a fruit juice concentrate, but lacked some honey notes on the traditional mead.

 

[bernardsmith]

What was the reason for adding sugar, Toxxyc? Sugar simply ups the ABV but adds nothing to flavor or aroma so it must affect the overall balance of your mead. If you wanted to increase the alcohol would it not have made more sense to either reduce the volume of water or to increase the amount of honey?

 

[Toxxyc]

What was the reason for adding sugar, Toxxyc? Sugar simply ups the ABV but adds nothing to flavor or aroma so it must affect the overall balance of your mead. If you wanted to increase the alcohol would it not have made more sense to either reduce the volume of water or to increase the amount of honey?

It was to simply up the ABV, yes. I wanted a bit more ABV since there was a target I was aiming for. In hindsight I guess I was extremely lucky that it worked out the way it did. Today the mead is delicious and drinkable, but I was worried about it for the entire 2 months it spent in the fermenter. So yes, it can be done, but I wouldn't do it again, unless I'm to re-do this same recipe again (which turned out good).

My reasoning was this: I didn't want to add more honey, since that would increase the honey flavour over and above what I was aiming for. I wanted a higher ABV because I knew with backsweetening I would lose some points there. The only solution I saw at the time was to add a plain sugar (dextrose), since it would add alcohol and alcohol only - no flavour, no colour and nothing else. Reducing the water content would also have two downsides to it - less volume of mead to play with in the end and, again, a higher concentration of honey in the must.

I must admit that what I created will probably not stack up to meads made the "proper" way, but it's mead, and it's good. Chilled it tastes like a flowery, fruity cider/cocktail, with a little kick, which is what I was hoping to attain.

 

[Chevette Girl]

It's not so bad to add sugar if you're also using fruit because you're adding flavour back in with fruit, sort of like combining a fruit wine with a mead rather than making a fruit mead, but if it's a traditional, all you're doing is adding alcohol content that will need to be balanced out with something, without adding more honey flavour to balance it out with. I used to make 14% "blank" wines (effectively, a fruit wine without the fruit, just sugar and water fermented with a little tannin and acid) as something to top off my wine carboys with and it really doesn't taste like anything but what you add to it. I wouldn't have wanted to add it in large quantities to any batch as it would dilute the flavour, I just wanted to be able to top off my carboys without affecting the alcohol calculations.

 

[gx1990k]

First of all, I must apologize as this probably being aking to throwing a bucket of dunder on the altar of meadery, but my intention from the beginning was to not make a classic mead, but instead a test run of fermented, non-distilled beverage with 12-14% ABV that tastes good and that resembles mead. I suppose from this point pretty much everything becomes possible in the limits of what yeasts can ferment and what tastes good to us. I migrate from distillery side and have made mostly neutrals and some whiskeys prior. Legal disclaimer: I live in a country that allows it. I have had good results with bakers yeast that is added to an excess in order to facilitate fast fermentations and usually aimed to 10-12% range in order to minimize impurities.

Inverting is just a thing I do because I get to dissolve the sugar quickly as well - it is somewhat painstaking to dissolve it in ferm temp water.

I actually made a test before with more mead-ish runs, but I had to crush the yeast out earlier than I expected due to an event, but after cooling and applying bentonite it gave surprisingly good result as a sweet mead. Aside from this, I have always put all my ferms through fractional still and never draught any of them as raw, so making ready to drink stuff without distilling it first is a newie.

The precise nature of wine yeast I used in this is not known, but it has been known to produce good results first hand up to 17% so I don't find it necessary to discover what type it actually is. Some brand yeasts like EC1118 etc. are hardly available and should be ordered overseas for me, and even if that's not an issue, I did not have the time to wait forever. I actually was gonna use a load of fresh bakers yeast for this batch, but decided to give this one a personal try. I used double the amount the package instruction says.

I added 1tsp of DAP as nutrient for the 6gal batch. Raisins are - like it was mentioned in the thread - for the taste and texture more than for nutrients. So far it has been running for about 52 hours and it bubbles away nicely.

 

[bernardsmith]

I know my ignorance is showing - but how does backsweetening effectively lower the ABV. If I make even a gallon (3785 ccs) and back sweeten by adding say 250 ccs of honey or sugar solution I am increasing the volume by about 6%

 

[Toxxyc]

Maybe my maths is wrong, but let's take my mead, for example:

4l of mead, at 12% ABV. That means there is 480ml of alcohol in that volume. Adding 1l of juice concentrate mix (recommended dilution was 1 to 4, but I used slightly less to taste), that increases the volume to 5l, but the alcohol remains the same. The end result is 9.6% ABV. It's not an incredible loss, but it's still noticeable.

If I fermented with the honey alone (the 2.375kg as per before), on the same batch size, I would have attained an OG of 1.06, with a potential 8.21% ABV, which, after dilution, would have been around 6.5% ABV. That's just too low for what I was aiming for, to be honest.

 

[gx1990k]

I finished the mead, re-racked it to remove all the solids and used sorbate and sulfite to kill any remaining yeast and bentonited it clear overnight. The outcome tastes very dry and it has got some harshness and FG appears to be 0.99, where corrected OG was 1.083. I bottled and backsweetened it and at 10% added sugar content the taste is very pleasant.

 

[Stasis]

That's a bit fast to bottle. Don't understand all the rush. I'll skip commenting about possible improvements to your protocol since I can't understand what your aim is and it seems you gave reasons for using wrong practices.. Even though doing things with the right practices is not more difficult or time consuming than doing them wrong.
I don't know what 10% sugar means. If you have 5 liters of fermented product you added 0.5 liters of sugar to backsweeten? We usually just state the FG after back sweetening

 

[Chilkat]

I used to make 14% "blank" wines as something to top off my wine carboys

You can DO that?! That's brilliant! Instead of adding water, you'll be adding fortified water.

 

[Squatchy]

I used to make 14% "blank" wines as something to top off my wine carboys

You can DO that?! That's brilliant! Instead of adding water, you'll be adding fortified water.

SoI make bone dry traditional and super sweet traditionals just the very reason to adjust my final profile in a mead if it needs to go drier or wetter than what I can accomplish with tweaks.

 

[Squatchy]

First of all, I must apologize as this probably being aking to throwing a bucket of dunder on the altar of meadery, but my intention from the beginning was to not make a classic mead, but instead a test run of fermented, non-distilled beverage with 12-14% ABV that tastes good and that resembles mead. I suppose from this point pretty much everything becomes possible in the limits of what yeasts can ferment and what tastes good to us. I migrate from distillery side and have made mostly neutrals and some whiskeys prior. Legal disclaimer: I live in a country that allows it. I have had good results with bakers yeast that is added to an excess in order to facilitate fast fermentations and usually aimed to 10-12% range in order to minimize impurities.

Inverting is just a thing I do because I get to dissolve the sugar quickly as well - it is somewhat painstaking to dissolve it in ferm temp water.

I actually made a test before with more mead-ish runs, but I had to crush the yeast out earlier than I expected due to an event, but after cooling and applying bentonite it gave surprisingly good result as a sweet mead. Aside from this, I have always put all my ferms through fractional still and never draught any of them as raw, so making ready to drink stuff without distilling it first is a newie.

The precise nature of wine yeast I used in this is not known, but it has been known to produce good results first hand up to 17% so I don't find it necessary to discover what type it actually is. Some brand yeasts like EC1118 etc. are hardly available and should be ordered overseas for me, and even if that's not an issue, I did not have the time to wait forever. I actually was gonna use a load of fresh bakers yeast for this batch, but decided to give this one a personal try. I used double the amount the package instruction says.

I added 1tsp of DAP as nutrient for the 6gal batch. Raisins are - like it was mentioned in the thread - for the taste and texture more than for nutrients. So far it has been running for about 52 hours and it bubbles away nicely.

One tsp of DAP is nothing near what a six gallon batch needs for YAN. I don't understand why you wouldn't want to learn how to make a real mead. If donne correctly I doubt you would feel the need to distil it. I would always add honey over sugar. If you ever make a mead and then make fermented sugar and compare them side by side you will understand. (Or maybe not) You could have easily added honey instead of sugar to get the ABV you wanted. And the honey would have added many things to your finished profile that sugar never will

 

[Squatchy]

Maybe my maths is wrong, but let's take my mead, for example:

4l of mead, at 12% ABV. That means there is 480ml of alcohol in that volume. Adding 1l of juice concentrate mix (recommended dilution was 1 to 4, but I used slightly less to taste), that increases the volume to 5l, but the alcohol remains the same. The end result is 9.6% ABV. It's not an incredible loss, but it's still noticeable.

If I fermented with the honey alone (the 2.375kg as per before), on the same batch size, I would have attained an OG of 1.06, with a potential 8.21% ABV, which, after dilution, would have been around 6.5% ABV. That's just too low for what I was aiming for, to be honest.

So thats an easy fix. Add enough honey to be a couple points above what your finished ABV so it will allow for dilution adding the fruit concentrate.

 

[Chevette Girl]

I used to make 14% "blank" wines as something to top off my wine carboys

You can DO that?! That's brilliant! Instead of adding water, you'll be adding fortified water.

...really, you can ferment just about anything*... And if you're only making meads, then squatchy's suggeston of sweet and bone-dry traditionals will definitely work better.

* if it has sugar, of course