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TRANSCRIPT
If you must know, I am holding up this maple tree.
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.
Our first question comes from Azazael from three and a half years ago, and he wants to know if I've ever used a dehydrated fruit in a mead. Now, I get lots of fruit questions and I don't brew with many fruits commercially. But I can tell you this. If you want to use dehydrated fruits at home, remember that sulfites are often used in the dehydrating process, so you want to be very careful about that when brewing with them.
Our next question comes from multiple different people and it's even older than that last question. I'm really catching up, guys. Anyway, “How do I drink a mug of mead that big without dying?” I think they're referencing the mug of mead from the intro that I just watched again a couple seconds ago. And the answer is, I don't know man.
Miguel is one of those stingy home brewers that I am one of and I am always warning you about. Miguel wants to know if you can recover the lost mead from racking by just adding a little more honey and water each time you do it. Unfortunately, that just creates new fermentation and new sediment, completely undoing what you're racking for. So anyway, yes, you theoretically can do it, but don't.
A lot of people have noticed that I recommend high temperature fermentations. We've talked about this in the past, but specifically high temperature fermentations with D47 yeast, which they claim the internet says, "performs poorly at high temperatures." As I've said before, "poor performance" to me is not finishing fermentation. An off flavor is a flavor you don't want in your beverage. And high temperature D47 fermentations give us just the mead we like.
Our last question this week comes from Vito the Guido, and he ruined a batch of mead. He gave me the full formula, exactly what he did. The problem is it smells like green olives! What did he do wrong? And he did one of two things. Insufficient yeast nutrient or too much of the wrong yeast nutrient. Anything with DAP in it can actually harm yeast if used incorrectly. So, try using something like Wyeast nutrient blend or another one of the mixed mineral blends, and I think you'll have more luck.
That was our last question this week. Keep sending them and I'll get to them as soon as possible. Cheers.
