What should the final gravity of mead be

You will have to change the water in your sink a few times to cool the must down sufficiently. A few trays of ice cubes added to the sink will hasten the chilling effect. Some meadmakers, especially those with a home winemaking background, sanitize their unfermented meads by adding one Campden tablet or 0. When doing this, let the unfermented mead sit overnight.

Cover the bucket loosely with aluminum foil, so the sulfur dioxide gas — released from the tablets or powder — can evaporate from the mead. Pitch your yeast the next day. Once the must is sanitized, transfer the honey and water mixture to a sanitized fermenter.

Add one teaspoon per gallon 3. As an option, you may also add up to 0. Next, pitch your yeast. My personal preference is for sweet mead, so I inoculate my meads with sweet mead yeast.

Wyeast also makes Dry Mead yeast. Vigorously shake or rock the mixture for at least five minutes to oxygenate the mixture, ensuring a prompt startup of fermentation. A day or two before the meadmaking day, I prepare my starter. Pitch your commercial yeast into the chilled mixture.

Vigorously shake it up, affix a sanitized airlock and let the starter sit at room temperture until you are ready to use it. I recommend affixing a stick-on type thermometer onto the primary fermenter to monitor the temperatures in the primary vessel. The initial fermentation usually starts slowly, but may kick into high gear, producing quite a bit of its own heat in the process. If you see this happening, move the vessel into a cooler environment.

After three months in primary fermentation, transfer the contents into a secondary vessel, preferably a glass carboy. Avoid splashing, or oxidation may occur. You will leave the mead in this vessel until all signs of fermentation are finished. This may take an additional six to nine months. One may check for completion by performing a specific gravity reading, waiting a couple weeks and checking it again.

If there is not any change, and the specific gravity is around 1. The cultured yeast that fermented so well initially actually dies from alcohol toxicity and leaves some unfermented sugars. If you choose to use dry mead yeast or Champagne yeast, then your final gravity will drop quite a bit lower — perhaps as low as 1.

Now that your mead is fermented out to the style you prefer, sweet or dry, the next step in the process is clarification. Meads are very special and take a lot of time to produce, so getting them to look good is important.

A little extra time for clarification may be necessary. In the end, your mead should be brilliantly clear. Maybe the yeast dropped out on its own, or maybe you left the mead in the fermenter a lot longer than you had planned and it cleared itself.

The mead can wait a few extra months before it needs to be bottled. Time and patience are necessary virtues. I view any haze at all as unacceptable, so I occasionally have to clarify my meads. I prefer the hot version, in which 0. After carefully adding the still-hot mixture to your hazy mead, a gentle stirring or swirling will mix it in.

Be careful if you are using a glass carboy. The clarification will start in a few hours, but may take a week or two or more to complete. A fine soft pancake of sediment will drop to the bottom of the vessel, eventually packing itself down. Sparkolloid does clear the mead very nicely, but the dropped out sediment is quite loose, and can be stirred up by just a little movement of the carboy.

I prefer to rack off my brilliant mead very carefully with small diameter plastic tubing. I start the siphon by filling the sanitized tubing with clean water and placing it about halfway down into the mead that I am transferring. Plastic tubing by nature always seems to have a curve in it, sort of a memory from it being rolled up in a coil.

Use this curve to your advantage by placing the tubing inside the carboy the mead is in about halfway down. The curved tubing will touch the inside wall of the carboy. Release the pinched tubing to drain the water, effectively starting the siphon action. When the mead starts flowing, place the tube to the bottom of the receiving bottling bucket. Be as careful as you can to avoid any splashing into the receiving vessel that may cause oxidation.

As the mead is transferring to the lower, receiving bottling bucket, slowly move the tubing down lower and lower into the sending glass carboy, taking extra caution by not stirring it up or moving the carboy. The tubing should be very visible through the clarified mead. When you get near the bottom, and have a chance of sucking up some sediment, stop the process by pulling the tubing out of the carboy.

What I do after the transfer saves every last drop of mead. I pour the entire remaining mead probably a quart or two, including the sediment into a glass pitcher and cover it with a plastic wrap. I then put the mead sludge in the refrigerator overnight. The next morning, I find a distinct layer of sediment with clear mead on top of it. Carefully pour the clear mead off, as you might do when decanting wine off some sediment. In this manner, you will recover virtually all of the remaining mead.

Bottling your mead is simply transferring it into a bottle without splashing. If you want a sparkling carbonated mead, add corn sugar at bottling as homebrewers would do when making a bottle-conditioned beer. I package my golden nectars in special icewine or flip-top bottles. I also label my meads with specially made labels. The type of mead I have described is a simple mead — basically just a mixture of honey, water and yeast.

But, you can add other ingredients to meads. Different mead-based drinks go by different names. Melomels are meads made with fruits or fruit juices. As for how much fruit to add, I feel more is better and I usually add 8—10 lbs. Some types of fruit — including raspberry and cranberry — will make the mead more acidic. When adding an acidic fruit, you should skip the addition of acid blend or at least decrease the amount.

Many fruits also add a bit of tannin to the mead. I add this when I pitch the yeast. Cyser is simply basic mead using apple juice or cider instead of water in the mead-making process. Trouble is it is already bottled in glass I'll crack the lids now and then to see if any pressure is building up then I'll put it out in the shed to mature, with crossed fingers!

Thankfully all screw caps and swing tops, not corks. I'll need to check gravity before adding campden in future batches, doh! This gives a medium dry mead with quite a punch. I doubt if you will have done any real harm.

Your mead will likely be on the medium side with a slightly lower alcohol content. You will have to wait to find out if it is really any good. My experience is that it will be at least one year before it mellows.

If you see higher than expected sediment you can bet that the fermentation continued in the bottle. Just don't panic. If necessary you can always re-bottle. Mead sediment is very neutrally buoyant. A good way to clear it is with a one litre or bigger conical flask off eBay. These are great for salvaging bottoms. When fermenting I find that the mead takes a long time to finish- I typically let it run for 21 days before racking into a glass carboy with air trap for several months.

I normally rack at least twice before putting the last rack into a keg. However, the assumptions made in the calculation do not hold true across the entire range of potential alcohols and honey contributions. First, mead calculators assume you have approximately This is a good basis, and many honey packers will modify the water content to produce honey around this sugar level.

However, minimally processed honey does not have The total batch volume will be 1 gallon, regardless of the volume of 1 pound of honey. To see the difference between these values, check out the table below. For an approximation of SG as a function of water content in the honey, see here. For a single pound honey per gallon must, the difference is only 3 gravity points across the entire range.

Multiply that for our example batches in the section above, however, and that range becomes 9 gravity points. This means that depending on your honey source, you could be as much as 1. To avoid this problem and ensure consistency batch to batch, measure and plan your batches using SG or Brix from a trusty hydrometer or refractometer.

Using an SG or Brix measurement circumvents the issue with different sugar contents, and ensures the same amount of sugar is always present in the must regardless of the sugar content of the honey. Another thing to remember about honey is that it is made up of many different sugar types.

On average, you have the following breakdown of sugars, however individual honeys will differ:. Specifically, maltose is not as readily fermented by wine yeasts, even though it is a favorite for beer yeasts. So while you have available sugar to the wine yeast in the form of maltose, it may not ferment depending on the yeast strain. This would leave you with some residual sugar unless another yeast type were introduced. Each method includes certain assumptions about your batch of mead and wine or beer , exposing the flaws that come with fitting linear models to exponential curves.

Similarly, depending on the efficiency of the fermentation, your yeast may create more or less alcohol than expected. This holds true for fermentable solutions, based on the assumption that SG is only biased by the content of sugar in solution, and that any other soluble solids do not impact the SG. Brix, a measure of sugar content in a solution, can then be directly correlated to SG. The Bates study referenced above calculated the SG for sugar content solutions from 0 to The chart below displays the subset of the Bates table as it is applicable to a meadmaker, covering the range of 0 to In the chart, we have included the linear, second order, third order, and fourth order polynomial approximations of SG as a function of Brix.

It is immediately apparent the linear approximation is not valid for the entire range. Further analysis of the data shows that the third order polynomial is the best estimation of these four models, thus the calculation for SG from Brix becomes the following:.

Because the third order approximation better matches the actual SG from the sugar content, we should use this formula to approximate the changes in SG as a function of honey additions to the must. In other words, our 35 gravity points for each pound of honey added to the must is a decent approximation, but a third order function would be a better method to estimate the increase in gravity points for each pound honey. In this equation, sugar the left hand side of the equation is converted into 2 ethanol and 2 carbon dioxide molecules.