Hello! I've been lurking for months, about time I contribute a little something meaningful to this excellent resource. We (my wife and I) have been making hard cider for a few years now, and started building meads in 2008.
Sometime shortly after pitching yeast on these batches, I found this site, and began studying. I've since picked up a few books (inc. the Compleat Meadmaker) and read them quite thoroughly. I say this by way of explanation; the procedure and recipe below is something I was taught by a friend, and does not reflect my current understanding of mead at all. I plan on starting a different thread in Recipe discussions where we can go into detail about all the things wrong with the process we used.
Background: We started the batches (there are two, same recipe and same behavior) on 10/05/09, 24 hours after hand-pressing the cider. I don't know what kind of apples they were; will try and find out.
Ingredients list:
18lbs clover honey
1t Irish Moss (yeah, I know...)
1T Gypsum
2T Yeast Nutrient (Brewcraft brand)
4632 Wyeast - Dry Mead Yeast
Fresh Cider to the 5 gallon mark
Procedure:
At pressing time, we added crushed campden tablets to the tune of 1 per gallon. We boiled the honey and nutrients and pitched on the following day, just over 24 hours later. All sanitation accomplished using common household bleach.
0. Break open the Wyeast smack pack and let it sit at room temp (70F) for a couple hours.
1. Combine all ingredients except cider and boil for 5 minutes, stirring constantly. Temperature reading after 5 minutes boiling was around 220 degrees fahrenheit.
2. Remove from heat and cool to pitching temp. Pitching temp was 67.7 degrees fahrenheit.
3. The OG was 1.145, and from that I came up with a 19.5% potential alcohol. I haven't double-checked that figure on the mead calculator yet but plan to do so.
4. We pitched the yeast, stirred like crazy, and let it sit for a week.
5. On 10/12/09, we racked it from the primary fermenter (8 gallon brewcraft bucket with a tight-sealing lid and airlock) to the secondary, a 5-gallon carboy. Sorry, we didn’t take a hydrometer reading.
6. We ignored it! No idea how long it went for before the fermentation ceased; if I had to put a line in the sand I’d guess it went for a month or more before the airlock ceased bubbling.
At some point we noticed that was no further airlock activity, and so took a gravity reading. 1.061 SG, and quite tasty, if a bit too sweet. A little math, and we concluded that there was far too much residual sugar for the yeast we used to have finished to completion.
Fast forward to the past week. Our PH meter came in the mail, and we got a temperature-corrected reading of 3.5. This seems on the low end, but not terribly low. We also re-checked the gravity, and confirmed found it to be the same as before, 1.061 and apparently holding steady.
The plan:
1. Adjust the PH to 3.8 by adding Potassium (bi)carbonate 1/2tsp at a time. Since the samples get thrown out after each addition and test, this could get expensive in terms of wasted product.
2. Rehydrate Lalvin EC-1118 using Go Ferm (also just came in the mail!) and build a starter out of the rehydrated yeast.
3. Pitch the starter.
….
4. Wait for action and adventure!
Questions:
0. Are we looking in the right direction at all here?
1. Honestly I’m not sure about the best way to build this starter. I’ve read about some folks adding some of the must to the starter to help acclimate the yeast; is this something we should do?
2. I was leaning toward not using must in the starter since while in the starter, the yeast should be in its growth phase, and all you’d end up doing is stressing the yeast. Is that correct?
3. Post-starter pitch, what other work have we earned with these batches? It seems that in addition to the typical aging required of any mead, these will also require a couple weeks' cold crash to knock the potassium (bi)carbonate out of suspension. Anything else?
4. Which should we use, potassium carbonate or potassium bicarbonate? We've managed to find both, and now are having trouble finding comparison data that would point us toward one over the other.
Thanks for taking the time to read all this... hopefully we'll all learn something new together!
Sometime shortly after pitching yeast on these batches, I found this site, and began studying. I've since picked up a few books (inc. the Compleat Meadmaker) and read them quite thoroughly. I say this by way of explanation; the procedure and recipe below is something I was taught by a friend, and does not reflect my current understanding of mead at all. I plan on starting a different thread in Recipe discussions where we can go into detail about all the things wrong with the process we used.
Background: We started the batches (there are two, same recipe and same behavior) on 10/05/09, 24 hours after hand-pressing the cider. I don't know what kind of apples they were; will try and find out.
Ingredients list:
18lbs clover honey
1t Irish Moss (yeah, I know...)
1T Gypsum
2T Yeast Nutrient (Brewcraft brand)
4632 Wyeast - Dry Mead Yeast
Fresh Cider to the 5 gallon mark
Procedure:
At pressing time, we added crushed campden tablets to the tune of 1 per gallon. We boiled the honey and nutrients and pitched on the following day, just over 24 hours later. All sanitation accomplished using common household bleach.
0. Break open the Wyeast smack pack and let it sit at room temp (70F) for a couple hours.
1. Combine all ingredients except cider and boil for 5 minutes, stirring constantly. Temperature reading after 5 minutes boiling was around 220 degrees fahrenheit.
2. Remove from heat and cool to pitching temp. Pitching temp was 67.7 degrees fahrenheit.
3. The OG was 1.145, and from that I came up with a 19.5% potential alcohol. I haven't double-checked that figure on the mead calculator yet but plan to do so.
4. We pitched the yeast, stirred like crazy, and let it sit for a week.
5. On 10/12/09, we racked it from the primary fermenter (8 gallon brewcraft bucket with a tight-sealing lid and airlock) to the secondary, a 5-gallon carboy. Sorry, we didn’t take a hydrometer reading.
6. We ignored it! No idea how long it went for before the fermentation ceased; if I had to put a line in the sand I’d guess it went for a month or more before the airlock ceased bubbling.
At some point we noticed that was no further airlock activity, and so took a gravity reading. 1.061 SG, and quite tasty, if a bit too sweet. A little math, and we concluded that there was far too much residual sugar for the yeast we used to have finished to completion.
Fast forward to the past week. Our PH meter came in the mail, and we got a temperature-corrected reading of 3.5. This seems on the low end, but not terribly low. We also re-checked the gravity, and confirmed found it to be the same as before, 1.061 and apparently holding steady.
The plan:
1. Adjust the PH to 3.8 by adding Potassium (bi)carbonate 1/2tsp at a time. Since the samples get thrown out after each addition and test, this could get expensive in terms of wasted product.
2. Rehydrate Lalvin EC-1118 using Go Ferm (also just came in the mail!) and build a starter out of the rehydrated yeast.
3. Pitch the starter.
….
4. Wait for action and adventure!
Questions:
0. Are we looking in the right direction at all here?
1. Honestly I’m not sure about the best way to build this starter. I’ve read about some folks adding some of the must to the starter to help acclimate the yeast; is this something we should do?
2. I was leaning toward not using must in the starter since while in the starter, the yeast should be in its growth phase, and all you’d end up doing is stressing the yeast. Is that correct?
3. Post-starter pitch, what other work have we earned with these batches? It seems that in addition to the typical aging required of any mead, these will also require a couple weeks' cold crash to knock the potassium (bi)carbonate out of suspension. Anything else?
4. Which should we use, potassium carbonate or potassium bicarbonate? We've managed to find both, and now are having trouble finding comparison data that would point us toward one over the other.
Thanks for taking the time to read all this... hopefully we'll all learn something new together!
