Sparkling mead? Dry or sweet mead?

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sentfromspain

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Hi, I recently brewed a braggot (supposedly), this is the final recipe for a 2.5 gallon batch:

-Steep 2.2 pounds of malt in 8/10 of a gallon of water
-Boil steeped malt during one hour in 2 gallons of water, adding 1 ounce of hops 15 minutes from the end of the boil
-Add 3.3 pounds of honey during the cool down
-Add 1 packet of safale yeast at room temperature

My first question:
-after letting the batch ferment for two months, will this be a dry mead/braggot? or a sweet mead/braggot?

My second question:
-How can I make sure that the mead/braggot ends up carbonated in the bottle? By adding (carefully) sugar to each bottle before sealing?

I supposed this is going to be a dry braggot, and not a sweet one, but I can't be sure as I have never done one before...
 
What was the OG? Looking quick at the numbers, it does appear to me it will be on the dry side, but it really depends on what kind of temp program you used for the mash; or is that extract, in which case it will depend on the extract. It still will be drier than you're probably used to for a beer due to the honey being all eaten up by the yeast.

To carbonate it, you'll want to make absolute sure that the ferment is done, and then you'll add a bit of sugar to the batch just before bottling. Somebody else can give you more specific details, as I've never bottle conditioned a brew.
 
Hum ? Well aren't most sparkling wines dry ? Especially if they're naturally carbonated......

Because you can make them dry, with enough space left in the tolerance to ferment any additional sugar used to carbonate it.....

If you did prefer something sweet, then you'd have to do all the normal stuff to make it a still, sweet wine and then work out how to force carbonate it.......
 
Probably similar to beer or a dry sparkling cider (I haven't opened my attempt at mead yet). There's a number of calculators which will describe how much sugar per how much volume of liquid in order to achieve certain levels of carbonation. This would need to be a dry drink though.

There would be two options, adding the sugar/dextrose/solution to each bottle, or adding it to a bottling bucket then bottling from there.

Alternatively, it's probably possible to use the traditional champagne method where it's carbonated, then the sugar solution with a preservative (or whatever) is added and recorked. Or force carbing, either a dry force carb, or a preserved&sweetened force carb
 
I read somewhere that when bottling 4 grams of sugar per liter of brew adds 1 volume of C02, and generally beer bottles can hold up to 2-3 volumes.

So if I bottled the braggot/mead in pint bottles, I could probably add 2 grams of brown sugar per bottle without too much worry. I just will have to figure out when to bottle, because we don't have a hydrometer or a way of measuring the gravity (we're super low tech).

I was thinking of perhaps trying the batch at 6 weeks to see if it tasted alright. If I were to bottle at 6 weeks, hypothetically, would this be problematic for the development of the brew? Would the yeast not be "done" yet, and would the bottles explode?
 
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