Hello! So I made a 5 gallon batch of blueberry/strawberry melomel a few months ago (end of April). It has cleared well and I'm ready to rack it to tertiary (primary was with the fruit). Anyway it has a current gravity of 0.998 and is a little dry for my wife's liking. My question is, how much more honey should I add to kick up the sweetness just a tad. Going through my notes I can not find the original gravity (shame on me) and I used Lavin D-47 if that helps. I started with 15 lbs of honey and 10 lbs of fruit.
Adding just a few drops of honey to the sample made it taste perfect, so I really think, this will end well if I could get some sweetening advice. thanks in advance!
Ah! D47........ I do hope you kept an eye on the fermentation temperature.
Anyway, if you get a pound of honey that you like the taste of, mix half of it with water, then add it a little at a time, making sure that you stir it in slowly and carefully, then take a hydrometer reading and a small taste, you'll know A) what a dry batch tastes like, B) roughly what final gravity is needed to get it to your desired/preferred sweetness.
Make sure that you stabilise this batch (sulphite and then sorbate) before back sweetening, as adding more fermentable sugars can start a re-ferment.
The only thing when back sweetening with honey, I tend to do that once the batch has finished it's ferment and it's been racked off the sediment and stabilised. Honey can sometimes cause a protein haze, and if it does that in an already cleared batch, it has to be cleared again. Hence I just ferment, rack, stabilise, back sweeten and then clear it - so I only clear it once.
I find that the "dessert" meads I've tasted are too sweet for me (IRO 1.040). I enjoy mine sweetened to about 1.015, which is what I tend to aim for.