Recent content by smn

To follow up on the rhubarb mead, I made a new batch this year with significantly higher OG. 5lb to approximately 1 gallon of water and maybe 1.5lb of briefly cooked rhubarb, bringing an approximated OG of 1.117. The fermentation went very quickly again without much assistance, it finished...

My friend is planning to start a 'Turbojniak', a dwojniak with a turbo yeast, this week. That would be starting with 1 part honey two parts water, then adding the rest of the honey when the initial fermentation calms down. I'll be starting a champagne-yeast based Trojniak where I'll try to...

Reading the PDF with more detail, it seems that strength adjustment with ethyl alcohol is allowed. Which means they probably do adjust it with ethyl alcohol. Oh well.

Thanks for the links, very interesting! The fermentation stage description in the PDF is unfortunately a bit short but reveals a few details. 1 part honey and 2 parts water would be a good enough starting point, producing a 'violent fermentation' for 6-10 days. After this a 'still fermentation'...

Poltorak is a type of polish mead, so called 'royal mead', which is supposedly one part water, two parts of honey. A typical polish commercial Poltorak has about 16% alcohol and is insanely sweet. I've been trying to work out how it is actually done and can't seem to make sense of it. If a...

The honey flavour tends to disappear almost entirely during fermentation, but it will return with time. If your mead is not infected or utterly over the top with some spices, you should be fine in the end.

I think the risk of getting a stuck fermentation grows a bit high, and even if it wouldn't stick, the process would be much slower than expected. My batch with an OG of 140 ended up sticking around 1.060, I got it resumed by adding a starter which brought in new yeast and water to reduce the...

I'm planning to do some sparkling mead champagne-style in the future, just for the sake of doing it. Now the champagne houses do a complicated process after secondary fermentation in bottle to get all the yeast into the neck of the bottle, then freeze the neck, open the bottle and the...

I've found Brouwland to be significantly cheaper as long as you order enough stuff to justtify the shipping costs. Also, Melkko doesn't describe the product contents at all on the website, I don't like ordering stuff blindly.

Another Finland meadmaker here (Espoo). The Nutrisal product is pure Diammonium phosphate (DAP). The nutrient blend seems to work well enough too.

I bottled this mead last weekend and sampled it a bit. It is nice enough with initial taste being somewhat acidic-rhubarbic then moving on to the honeyness. Same thing with the nose, it takes a little while in a glass for the honey aromas to come out. I think the level of rhubarb is just...

I put 30 cloves in a one gallon batch. The result is, well, interesting.

I have no experience using liquid yeast, but from your description it sounds like the yeast has been pasteurized in the mail. With those ingredients you should be able to see something in two days, unless the starting yeast colony was extremely small. I don't think this case can be called a...

I started another batch of mead not too long ago. The recipe (converted from metric, thus the weird amounts): 3.3 lb of wildflower honey 1.25 gallons of water 1 lb of rhubarb Tiny cut of ginger Nutrients & DAP 1/2 packet of Bioferm Champagne yeast OG was around 1.080. I cooked the...

Can't really estimate the end result. It might take it all the way dry even, it might only drop 20 points or so. Get a good starter going and acclimatize it properly for the best results. Rack it off the old lees before restarting and don't worry about off flavors at this point.