In which Ricky the Meadmaker answers questions about using honey instead of priming sugar, filtering to stabilize mead, gives a recipe for a simple one gallon batch, and more!
Last week, our word of the week was acetaldehyde. But Word of the Week Ricky said acetyl aldehyde. He has been sent off to word saying school.
Welcome to Ask the Meadmaker, where I, Ricky the Meadmaker, answer your questions about mead making, mead drinking, mead brewing, and really any question you're willing to send to me.
The first thing I have to say this week is a correction. Word of the Week Ricky may have screwed up. I screwed up big time in writing in our recipe blog, and almost in a BYO article, I accidentally said that I recommend one ounce of Wyeast nutrient per gallon. But what I meant to say was one ounce of Wyeast nutrient per five-gallon batch. That's a big difference. One ounce per five gallons is still a lot more than they recommend. But it is one fifth less than that other thing that I said, and I'm sorry.
Here's one I don't think I've answered. I've gotten a few questions about priming with honey, using honey to add the carbonation at the end of your fermentation in the bottles or kegs, rather than using, say, white sugar. Do I think it's a good idea and do I think it makes a difference? And the answer is, I don't think it's a terrible idea. And no, I don't think it makes a difference.
Pastor Pipes is a lazy beer brewer which is my favorite kind because I'm also a lazy beer brewer and I'm more or less a lazy meadmaker as well. And he wanted to know a quick and dirty one-gallon recipe for mead that would be worth drinking. Here it is: just less than a gallon of water. One to two pounds of honey, D47 yeast, and one-fifth of an ounce of Wyeast nutrient.
Andrew noticed that I don't filter my mead and in fact even discourage filtering mead. But he thought that clarification was important for stability. Now, stability is a complicated concept. Ask anyone who's been married for a long time. But stability in mead is even more complicated than stability in marriage, which mostly relies on not being an idiot all the time. But stabilizing mead isn't even well understood. Basically, what you're saying is, in three years, is it still drinkable? So, when you say I need to stabilize my mead, you might also be saying it needs to be drinkable by not being over carbonated and blowing up the bottles. That is to say, killing any residual yeast if you want a sweet product. So, when someone says, "is it important for stabilizing your Mead?" You have to be very specific about what you're talking about. If you want a sweet product and you want it to lay down well, you're going to need to do something to kill residual yeast or push it past the point where that yeast is willing to eat any more sugar. Either way, you'll have a stable product.
Here's a great question I got from dozens of people all of a sudden, and I don't know how I've never answered it. Do my pieces of advice individually and in aggregate, apply to honey wines, as well as craft meads? And the answer is, yes, I like to think so. Although the final product tastes different, and is packaged differently, at its heart, meet his need, and the rules are generally consistent. I think. I don't make much honey wine. If you find that my rules don't work for the thing that you make, shoot me an email and tell me why you think the rules might be different. I've never found a difference in our fermentation styles from craft mead to honey wines.
In fact, some of our things are made as honey wines, and then brought down to be craft meads in ABV and carbonated. So, I guess by definition, my rules would work for both. But as you can tell, I don't know. So, that's our last question this week. And again, it's one of those things where it's kind of a question for you. Word the Week Ricky is off at his camp, learning how to say words right. And hopefully he'll be back with us next week and on probation. Until then, keep sending your questions and I'll get to them as soon as possible. Cheers.
