Taste of Young Mead

[sandig]

I racked my pumpkin mead to the secondary today. (See brewlog for specifics) I tasted it (of course) it was at 1.000 SG. How do you know if it is going to taste good after aging? Right now it tastes a bit like grain alcohol with some spice. I was hoping this would be a little sweeter, will it mellow with age or did I kill my first mead?

Thank you
Sandi

 

[sandman]

Some aging should mellow it out a bit. If it's still too dry after a few months, you can always backsweeten it at that point by adding some honey to it in small measured increments until it's sweet enough for you.

 

[wayneb]

It will mellow (as I said in the other thread). Also, something will begin to develop that you will perceive as sweetness if this batch ages as some of the others I've added maple to in the past. Sample it again in a couple of months before you decide if it needs more residual sugar.

 

[ßrew ßee]

I tasted my first batch after a week of fermentation and I could clean my car engine with this stuff.. ;D Anywho I should get better in about a year.
Good luck with the pumpkin sounds great.

 

[wildaho]

Dude...

I think you'll find that it will mellow faster than you think. Rocket Fuel happens from stressed or forced yeast. Were you fairly gentle in your fermentation regime? There is a fine line between NH3 and mead. It can be a fine line, granted, but time will usually be your friend.

For instance: I regularly push a 15% yeast (Red Star Champagne) to over 21% and still avoid the rocket fuel edges. How? Well, I wait at least 3 or 4 months. Look at the NSA schedules in the FAQs here. Most of the people here use Lallimand or Lavlin yeasts and I envy them. Thei're not available to me short of mail order.

They know exactly what nutrients those yeasts need, extensive as they are. I've been lucky with the yeast I have available locally. But to tell you the truth, I'm a gonna order some of these yeasts, and especially the nutrients that go with them for my next batch.

I've already seen the difference between my meads and beers since I first starrted looking at this site. My fermentations are definitely shorter and the aging is wayyyyyy shorter.

 

[wayneb]

Hey! I've got some good news for you!! I've been using the SNA protocol developed by Hightest (not much different from Oskaar's) with Red Star yeasts, and after a several batches I can say with some confidence that the Pasteur Champagne works about as well as any of the Lalvin strains when nourished according to SNA, using amounts of nutrient similar to those recommended for any of the Lalvin "low nitrogen" needs yeasts. The Montrachet also benefits, but in my experience it needs more nitrogen at the midpoint of fermentation, so I add about another 0.5g per gallon of DAP at the midpoint. That both clears any hint of H2S aroma and prevents the overly "phenolic" character that has given Montrachet such a bad rap over the past 10 years or so.

Thanks for referring to me as one of the "experts" in another post, BTW. I don't really see myself that way (I'm not in Oskaar's league -- but maybe I can be called up from the minors some day!! ) , but I do like to share what I've learned with others who want to make good mead. The best part of finding the Gotmead site for me is after making mead for years (well, decades actually) using methods I developed piecemeal via trial and error, I suddenly found a community of people who have been experimenting, learning, and sharing the results of their work with the larger community. I feel somewhat like a hermit who's crawled out of his cave after 20 years, to find that the whole world's changed in the interim!

 

[Rhianni]

1.000 meads are very dry and it should taste rough in the mouth. Some meads take months (even years) before they are really great.