Yes, it's another "did I ruin my batch" question.

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weirdboy

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As I stated in the other thread I made, I'm a complete mead n00b. I started my first batch of mead today. I rehydrated the yeast at around 105F with a bit of yeast nutrient, mixed in all my honey with slightly heated tap water, and then pitched the yeast immediately. I wasn't thinking at all, and only realized that my must (is it called a must before you pitch?) was still pretty hot when I was checking the gravity, doing my normal procedure of dropping the hydrometer and using the thermapen for a temp reading. The temp at time of pitching was 102F.

Realizing my mistake, I immediately moved the carboy to my swamp cooler which was already half-filled with water, and dropped in several bottles of ice. It's been about 30 minutes or so, and the carboy is still in the 97-98F range.

So, how much did I just screw up my mead? Do I still have a window to get it cooled down to normal fermentation temps, and if so, how long is that window?
 
You didn't even come close to messing up your mead. Like beer, you want to ferment cool but it should get there just fine by tomorrow.
 
Mead is a long term relationship.
A little heat now shouldn't hurt it.

A year from now, your mead will have changed so much that a day or two of warmth really won't matter.
 
Actually his must temperature was just a couple of degrees cooler than the rehydrated yeast. It probably did just fine, thermally. As long as he can get the temperature down to around room temp in short order, then there shouldn't be any problems with excessive fusel generation, or oxidation, or the like.
 
Well I dunno it was bubbling away the next morning so I thought everything was fine, but I just checked the gravity, now a week later, and it only seems to have dropped a point or two. I assume this isn't a good sign.

I added a teaspoon of yeast nutrient when I checked the gravity, and then when I looked up the OG realized it hadn't really fermented much.

So, I want to pitch a new yeast, but the only yeasts I have in the house are S-04, S-05, T58, and bread yeast. I can maybe pick something up over the weekend if necessary. I was hoping to use the Lavlin K1V-1116 again, but am I pushing my luck by waiting so long before I can get any?
 
It takes a month or more to get the gravity down on mead. It is not a fast like beer but slow and steady.

I think you should just walk away from it for another month, then check your gravity.
 
Yeah, but it's literally within the margin of error on my hydrometer after a week. We're talking from like 1.066 to 1.065. I can understand slow fermentation, but this looks more like no fermentation to me. Also, the website for the Lavlin specifically says that yeast is a fast fermenter (among wine yeasts).

What I am worried about with just leaving it sit there for a month is that in the meantime I'm going to pick up some wild yeast strains, which I don't really want for this recipe, that are going to take over the batch and then I'll be stuck with whatever I get.
 
You probably toxified your yeast by rehydrating with nutrient instead of Go-Ferm. Regular yeast nutrients are very harmful to yeast in the rehydration stage. If I were you I would add enough campden tablets to your must in accordance to the size of the batch wait 24 hours and re-pitch with a big yeast starter. Not rehydrated with nutrient! ;)

And on a side note, meads shouldn't be a long drawn out ferment. Following an SNA and aerating at least twice daily to the 1/3 break I'm able to get high gravity meads fermented bone dry in a week, sometimes less than.
 
Yeah, but it's literally within the margin of error on my hydrometer after a week. We're talking from like 1.066 to 1.065.

what temps did you take your gravities at, and did you temp correct? If you got 1.066 @ ~102*F; getting 1.065 @ ~70*F would show some fermentation.

You should be okay. I had a mead that took almost 4 months to ferment fully.
 
I think it was 1.060 @ 102F or so, adjusted to 1.066~1.067.

On the plus side, the airlock is now bubbling again after I added the yeast nutrient, and I have a small krausen, so at least there's *something* in there converting sugars. I guess I'll let it do its thing for a couple more weeks before I worry about it again.
 
well, don't get your hopes up yet - when you add nutrient to an active fermentation, you'll get a bunch of off-gassing that may look like krausen.

But on the positive side, hang in there for the long haul - honey fermentation takes a long time.
 
OK so as an update to this, I let it do its thing for a week or so and then checked the gravity, which had come down to about 1.036. At this point I "distressed" 8 pounds of frozen blackberries, threw them into a paint strainer bag and tied it closed, then racked the mead on top of them. Of course, they floated to the top, but you know what I mean. The week or so following that shuffle saw pretty much constant activity in the airlock.

It's now been about 2 weeks since then, and I've racked it back to the better bottle. Gravity reading was down to 0.96 which puts my ABV estimate at the 14% to maybe 14.5% if I account for the fermentables in the blackberries. It had turned a pretty deep red/purple color in the intervening two weeks. It looks like a merlot, and smells pretty similarly, too. Very strong berry aroma, but the flavor is not nearly as potent as I expect from looking at it and smelling it, probably because there aren't any (or at least, as many) tannins like you'd get in a red wine. It tastes semi-sweet to me, which is surprising to me considering the low gravity.

At this point I guess it's fairly stable but I plan to top it off as necessary in the coming months.
 
I believe I read somewhere (here on the forums) that a young wine that's still cloudy and all will taste slightly sweeter than it really is. I wouldn't worry about the sweetness until it's had time to age out a little.
 
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