Should It Be This Hard to Make a Hydromel

Hydromel Recipe:

• 1 gal. spring water
• 1-1/2 lbs honey (actually, 25 oz)
• 5 g Fermax yeast nutrient
• 4 g Safale US-05 yeast
• 1/2 tsp Bentonite
• 1 tsp wine tannins
• 1 tsp acid blend

I keep wanting to make a low alcohol mead around 7%-8%, but so far my meads keep hitting double digits.

Today I made a hydromel using just 1-1/2 lbs of honey, but try as I may, it still came out at a potential ABV of 10%. It may be the yeast won't chew it all up, but I'm not so hopeful.

As I always do, I started off boiling a pot of water to put the honey container into. While that was underway, I added 4 c of spring water to the kettle and heated it for 1-1/2 minutes, which got the temp to 121F. When rehydrating yeast, you want the GoFerm water as hot as possible and then have it cool to the temp you need to rehydrate your yeast. Unfortunately, by the time I figured out how my Fermax I was going to need, the water had cooled to 112F. Not bad, just not as hot as I was hoping for.

To calculate how much yeast nutrient you'll need, you take how much yeast you're using (4 g), multiply by by 1.25 (5g), then multiply that answer by 20 to determine how much yeast you need, or 100 ml. I took the hot kettle water, poured 100 ml into a bowl, and added the 5 g of Fermax.

In the meantime, I completed making the must. I added a cup of hot water from the kettle to the fermenter, and then added a 1/2 tsp Bentonite. The fermenter I'm using this time is actually one of the 1 gal. apple juice bottles from the cyzer I made because it has a wider mouth on it. But it also has a pronounced hump in the bottom so the Bentonite hit that and the water didn't reach over it, plus it had grooves in it and the clay became a stick mess in there. I was able to pry it out using my bottling wand, but almost gunked that up with the clay. In the end, most of the clay was incorporated into the water.

I next added more hot water from the kettle and then added the honey, which was actually 25 oz, instead of 24 oz. Not a big deal. I added all the hot water, added reserved spring water, then put in 1 tsp of wine tannin and aerated the hell out of it with my whip. However, the must temperature was 91F so I put it into the freezer to bring the temperature down.

I took a gravity reading beforehand though and got 1.074, or about 10% ABV, or a Brix reading of 18. I need the Brix reading to determine how much nutrient I need for the step nutrient additions. You take the Brix, multiple by 10 and then multiple by a factor based on how much nitrogen it needs. I couldn't find the info for US-05, so I chose a middle of the road number of 0.9. You then divide the answer by 100 (for ppm) and that is the number of grams of nutrient needed for the SNA.

In my case that meant (18 x 10) = 180 x 0.9 = 162 / 100 = 1.62 grams, which is a very teensy amount. I'll need to recheck these calculations.

Interestingly, I found out that 1 tsp of US-05 equals 3.7 g, not the 2 g I had been assuming; but also 1 tsp. of Fermax equals 5.1 g. Without my new gram scale, I'd never have known all this.

I also took a pH reading of the must and was surprised to see it at 5.22. I've been reading lately not to worry about pH so much in primary and simply adjust for it at the end, if at all, but I've also read that high pH's like this can affect the fermentation so I added 1 tsp of acid blend and that corrected it to 3.50, which is good.

To rehydrate the yeast, US-05 calls for adding the yeast to water that's between 77F-84F (not over 100F like most other yeasts I've used). After letting it sit for 15-30 minutes, you then gently stir it for 30 minutes before pitching it into the must.

I did all this, then pitched the yeast into the must and instead of adding an airlock, I'm going to try an open ferment during primary. Ryan Carlson on a GotMEad Live podcast recommends this as it helps get oxygen into the must and improves the quality of the ferment. I covered the opening with a do-rag to keep out bugs so we'll see how this goes.

One other thing is Safale says US-05 really likes temps between 64F-82F to ferment so keep it in that range. I raised the fermentation chamber temp to 19C (66F). It's the low end of the temp, and I'll keep an eye on it to see if it needs to be raised, but I'm still operating on the cooler is better for fermentation.

Mango Habanero Mead

This mead marks my first attempt at being super "professional" with my mead making. I'm going to try to use a many best practices as possible for this batch..

What that entailed was first rehydrating the yeast using a nutrient. Previously I either just rehydrated the yeast in water or pitched it dry into the must. This time around I heated up 4 c of water in my electric kettle for one minute which allowed it to attain temperature of about 113F. Then using calculations which said to use 1.25x of Fermax the grams of yeast you're using, mix the nutrient in 20x the amount of water heated to 107F.

Now the rehydrating process is actually for using Fermaid-O or -K (the Fermaid-O calculation is slight different), but I've read that Fermax can reliably be substituted for Fermaid-K, so I went with that.

Since I'm using 2g (1 tsp) of D47 yeast, that meant I needed to use 2.5g (1-1/4 tsp) of Fermax in 50 ml of water. When the temp of the Fermat-Infused water drops to 104F,  pitch the yeast into it and let it stand for 15-20 min. The Lallemand yeast website says the entire rehydration process should last no more than 45 min.

With the yeast rehydrating, 1 added 1 c of kettle water to the fermenter and added 1/2 tsp of Bentonite. I then shook vigorously to mix.

The honey had previously been placed in a saucepan with boiling water to liquefy and I now measured out 1-1/2 lbs of honey. I might have been justified in using only 1 lb because the mango juice I'm using also has sugar.

I took a hydrometer reading of just the juice and it read 1.050, which is where I was shooting for, and I knew I would be adding water as well, but I couldn't quite figure out how much honey would be needed. It was all a guessing game and as we'll see, I was a bit off.

I added the remainder of the hot water and shook vigorously to incorporate the honey. I then emptied two 33.8 oz. containers of mango nectar (from concentrate) into the fermenter. I also add 1 tsp of wine tannin. With the fermenter approaching full, I took some readings: the original gravity was 1.080, a little above what I was shooting for as it gives me a potential ABV of 10.5%. the pH was 3.82, which seemed okay and the must temp was 89F.

I checked the yeast slurry temp, which had been sitting for about 30+ minutes and it was 87F. That's good because you want the yeast and must to be within 10F of each other, but you also want to pitch the yeast when the must is between 75-80F. I hope it doesn't effect the yeast, but I pitched it nonetheless.

Last, I aerated the must with my whip and realized I really should have done it prior to pitching the yeast, but as I'll be aerating for the first 3 days perhaps it's not a big deal.

I'll also be adding nutrients in a staggered fashion over the next few days, but since it will amount to about 1/8 tsp each addition, who knows whether it will amount to anything significant. I'll also be degassing the mead until it hits the 1/3 sugar break (1.026), which should be within the first few days.

And airlock was added to the fermenter and it was placed in the fermentation freezer.

UPDATE (10/9/17): Little to no airlock activity for most of the day. Perhaps if I had more patience it would have been okay, as there was one bubble popping every minute, but I decided to pitch another teaspoon of yeast.

I rehydrated it in the typical manner (no nutrients, just water) and acclimated it to the lower must temp before pitching. A few hours later I went to check on it and it was clear there was significant activity: there was a lot of bubbly crud on top and some relatively clear must below. It looked like it was going to bubble up through the airlock,  so I added a blowoff tube to it: my siphon hose into a pitcher of StarSan.

Initially I had it sitting on top of the freezer in a Wal-Mart bag to keep the light out, but then remembering D47 yeast doesn't like warm ferments (over 70F) I moved it and the blowoff tube into the freezer. Using the Thermowell, it seems like the must temp was around 23C, which is north of 70F, so it looks like it was a good move. We'll see how it has progressed tomorrow when I make the second nutrient addition.

A New Cyzer

This past weekend I pitched a new cyzer. The last one was an abject failure as it developed a pellicle and then turned horrible in taste. But it had been made with real apples that I had neglected to wash and sanitize properly so I guess it's not surprising it got infected.

This time I went with an all-juice recipe. Since the juice already has preservatives in it, it should inhibit any wild yeast from taking hold.

I made the cyzer just as I would a regular mead, but I used my new juice-only kettle to heat up the nice. It's a different design  than the other (the other is better), but it did the job. I added a cup of heated juice to the fermenter along with a 1/2 tsp of Bentonite and shook vigorously. Then I added some more juice and added 1 lb. of the liquefied honey and mixed it well.

The rest was as it normally is, filling up the fermenter with the rest of the reserved juice and adding the adjuncts to it. Gravity readings, temperature readings, and pH were all taken. An airlock was added and then it was placed in the new fermentation chamber.

A converted upright freezer, the fermentation chamber has been laid on its back (the compressor was rotated to remain upright) and a new digital thermostat was added to regulate the temperature. It fluctuates between 19.5C (67.1F) and around 17C (62.6F). I'd like to dial it in a little more to narrow the range, but once the compressor kicks on it drops the temp a certain amount, and if I lowered the upper level it would dip down into the 50F range, which would be too cold I think.

The fermentations of the cyzer (and of the orange creamsicle I also have in the chamber) and going well, however, so I'll leave it as is.