5 gallons of mead, ready for bottling.
Some 750ml bottles, for aging.
Filling some plastic "Mr. Beer" 1 litre bottles. These will be drunk while the mead is still "young"
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Adventures in Mead--bottling!
- Thread starter Tinwhistler
- Start date
5 gallons of mead, ready for bottling.
Some 750ml bottles, for aging.
Filling some plastic "Mr. Beer" 1 litre bottles. These will be drunk while the mead is still "young"
The key is patience. The mead won't be 'good' really for another year. But nobody in my house is that patient, so I put half aside for drinking, and half for aging. If I brew 4-5 times a year, I should be able to drink a bottle a week or so, and still have 40-50 bottles that have aged by the time the year is up.
Eventually you get a good feeling about how a mead will turn out by the smell and taste of it while it's "in process", even though it may be some time before it finishes out. If something goes wrong, you generally know right away.
Skunky flavors, cidery flavors, etc, all will show up long before you bottle for aging, and a lot of those kinds of flavors will actually mellow out over time. If you get an infection, you'll be able to see it, because the top of your mead will start looking like a petri dish:
Compared to homebrew beer, mead is pretty hard to get infected, though, since honey has natural antibiotic qualities at the concentrations used for mead. Out of the 20+ batches I've brewed, I've only ever had one turn on me...had a favor reminiscent of sweat, that I noted when I moved from the primary fermenter. Probably indicative of Brettanomyces infection. These days, adding "brett" to your homebrew is somewhat of a growing fad, but I'm still not a fan
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Nice work. How sweet is mead? I've tried the Mr Beer kit, but haven't gone full-on brewing yet. I don't drink enough to justify the cost, but I do like a delicious beer. My buddy is crazy about it and goes with the propane (think turkey fryer) route with a kegerator.
Mead isn't naturally sweet. Almost all of the sugars in 15lbs of honey will ferment out, leaving you with a white wine with a honey bouquet and about 15-18% alcohol content. Using hardier yeast (like champagne yeast) will get you between 17-20% alcohol, and you'll end up with a very dry white wine.
That said, there are things you can do to get a sweeter mead:
- Use ale yeast, which has a lower alcohol tolerance. It will die off before all of the sugars are fermented. It still won't be super sweet like Chaucers or other "dessert meads"
- Use campden tablets and potassium sorbate in combination when your mead is at the level you want. The campden will stun the existing live yeast, and the potassium will prevent it from reproducing.
- Use a professional filter to remove the live yeast (expensive)
- Ferment to dryness, wait a long time to ensure that no yeast are left alive, and then "backsweeten" (add honey). This is almost certainly how all super-sweet mead on the market is produced.
When I made my one and only batch of dandelion wine, I ensured its sweetness by grossly oversugaring it, causing the yeast to hit its die-off point while there was still a whole bunch of sugar present. For those who haven't heard the story, the oral recipe I followed called for 5 cups of sugar but I misinterpreted and accidentally used 5 pounds of sugar. It was still quite drinkable and a pale yellow mead-ish color, but it was also at a level of sweetness approaching yellow Chartreuse...from above.
--Patrick
--Patrick
