Help w/ a cyser

Okay, so I wasn't looking at recipes, and made myself two 1 gallon batches this weekend, one is just a mead w/ some oranges in it for flavor (and cloves and cinnamon) and I put in some white labs sweat mead yeast and wyeast yeast nutrient in it and the cyser, the orange mead is kicking off and fermenting well. The cyser, not so much, I mixed in 3 lbs clover honey and the remainder of the gallon of tree top apple juice, yeast and nutrient and it seems to be fermenting but REALLY minimally. I see some cyser recipes w/ corn sugar, others w/ nothing. Am I missing something? Will it still ferment, or not? Should I just pour in some corn sugar to the top of it to get it going or will that even work, that concentrated, and not well mixed?

You don't need more fermentables in there! If I'm reading your recipe correctly you just mixed a 3 lb jar of honey into enough apple juice to make one gallon, right? With apple juice's average gravity of 1.050 and 3 lbs of honey in that gallon, you should have an initial gravity of around 1.140! That's very high, and even aggressive strains of yeast might have a hard time starting in a must up that high. The sweet mead yeasts, both from Wyeast and White Labs, will be problematic in a must that loaded with sugars.

I'd try diluting it with a little water - if you have a hydrometer I'd recommend mixing in enough water to get the gravity down to around 1.110, or slightly lower. You might also have to re-pitch some more yeast.

Finally, I haven't used Tree Top apple juice in a long time. Is it still preservative-free? Look very carefully at the label on the bottle - if it says it has sorbate or benzoate in it, then you probably have enough preservatives in there to keep the yeast from ever developing a colony large enough to do real fermentation.

well, its the same juice I used in my apfelwine... and it worked fine. I don't have enough room in the jar to add any water sadly... yes I have a hydrometer, but didn't take an OG. What you're saying makes sense now, though, i should have diluted it more w/ water to lower the OG so its not too harsh on the yeast... hmm it seems to be kinda doing something, but not tons... maybe the yeast will succeed in months instead of a week or two lol... not sure what I should do, that's part of the reason I only did 1 gallon, its an experiment thanks for the info.

If you've got an easy way to pour off about a pint (or siphon it out), then you can top off with plain water -- and that should drop the OG down to around 1.110. Then your yeasties should take off!

So I ended up having to throw this out, sadly... I'm experimenting now w/ a different recipe and did a mead starter w/ honey at about 1.030, and the yeast has gone berserk, That and some mead nutrient I'm sure helped.

Wow, that is sad.

If you'd been able to split that into two gallon batches of 1.070 gravity it would have probably been pretty tasty. Any of the "Sweet Mead" yeasts seem to be problematic. They're either inconsistent or unreliable.

All the Best,
D. White

I've not checked a gravity but its still kicking away, cloudy, and gassing like mad, over a week later, so I have some hope for this batch