Ask the Meadmaker Ep. 99 – The Original Meadiac

I got a recommendation from a meadiac somewhere halfway across the country that I should drink a pint of mead when I answer each question, and although my doctor recently said I'm a man with a liver the size of my heart, I still think that would be unwise.

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 we have to say today is happy birthday to Andrea Suazo of Winooski, Vermont. You would know Andrea better however, as the Mannaz girl, here's a poster of her. That's our very first poster ever for any of our products. And she's 30 years old, happy birthday from us. Keep drinking. 

AJ wants to know the difference between yeast nutrient and yeast energizer. And the difference is functionally, yeast nutrient goes in before you start fermentation. It's mostly nitrogen and it gets taken up during propagation of the yeast and it adds to overall yeast health and colony size. Yeast energizer goes in after fermentation starts and it's got a whole bunch of other things. Vitamin B, diammonium phosphate and a variety of things that help kick start the fermentation to get it going again. They're not really interchangeable. 

Our next question comes from Bern-ARD or possibly BERN-ard I have an uncle BERN-ard. I've never known anyone else to pronounce his name that way. He doesn't pronounce it that way. Just his mother does. Anyway. Bern-ARD, I presume, has a great question and even better way of asking it. He makes dry meads like I do. He goes below 10 on his final gravity a lot of the time, but he wants to try stopping it at 10.05 or 10.08. And his phrase was, can you catch the bullet between your teeth? Do you need to go all the way down, ferment dry, sulphite, sorbate, and then bring it back up by back-adding sugar or honey? Or can you stop it right where you want it? The answer is it's known as cold crashing, and it can be done. It's done very commonly on a commercial scale. What you do is you take your gravity reading every day, and when it gets there really close, you crash it fast. The reason it's more common on a commercial scale than a homebrew scale is it's really tough to shift the temperature of a liquid that fast unless you have glycol or some other massive chilling unit. So, it can be done. If you live in northern climates, you can do it during the winter. Stick it outside and slosh it around regularly. And then yes, sulfite, sorbate, clarify, put it in bottles, and you should have the residual sweetness you're after. 

Grant is a bucket shaker. He likes to degas his fermentations throughout the process by shaking it back and forth, just like I recommend. But then he listened to my interview. He started to worry maybe he's doing it too much, because I said in my interview on basic brewing, that maybe towards the end of your fermentation, you could start aerating it or oxidizing it. And that's not ideal. Well, if you're in a bucket, there's a CO2 layer that forms on top of it. A carboy has an even thicker, denser layer. It has to do with the weight and air and all these things. Plus, plastic permeability and glass permeability. Anyway, what matters is you're probably not going to start oxidizing it unless you get really crazy and you're shaking it after fermentation is long complete, because that layer of CO2 will be protecting it. 

Our last question comes from Tyler of the North. He wants to make a mead that has hibiscus or rose in it and he found that he had a bottle of rosewater in his kitchen. You know, the stuff for baking and wanted to know if he could just pour a little bit of that in. The answer is you sure can. I in fact once made a rose mead and it was so popular that it was a special request at a wedding. So, there you go, it can be done. It has been done, do it at home. 

That's our last question. Keep sending them and I'll get to them as soon as possible. Cheers.