Lalvin D47 and alcohol tolerance

I am playing around with a basic mead recipe of just honey, water and yeast. I don't know if the Beer Recipator is the best tool for this either...

Anyways, I've read that by simply using a yeast that doesn't have the alcohol tolerance, and exceeding that tolerance, I can make a sweet mead. Lalvin's tech sheet for their D 47 yeast says it'll handle an "Average alcohol tolerance up to 14%". Anyone have a clue if average=ABV or actual? It makes a big difference in the amount of honey needed.

Recipe 1 calls for 18 pounds of honey to reach 14% actual


And recipe 2 calls for 15 pounds to reach 14% by volume


Anyone see any major flaws with this, like I might be using the recipator wrong for this? My Macbook with Beer Alchemy is at home at the moment, and I don't know if there a major difference in calculating things differently for mead.

Any idea how sweet an FG of 1.030 might be?


Thanks,
Matt

Well, I don't know about using that software, so I'll let someone else speak to that. There are a couple of things that come to mind, though, with pushing the alcohol tolerance to have a sweet mead. First is that average alcohol tolerance. You could actually get a happy yeast and go over 15% ABV. That will be hot sweet rocket fuel that will take a long time to age out. If that's ok with you, of course that's fine.

I do not like sweet wines or meads, but I personally think 1.030 would be way, way too sweet. What I would suggest doing is maybe pick a wine you like and sweeten it to your taste and then measure the sg of that sample to get an idea of what you would want roughly. I sweetened my dandelion wine to 1.010, and I think that's a little too sweet for me, but other people like it.

According to the "Great Mead Experiment", wine yeasts finish mead around 1.000-1.004; so you're looking at a really slow finish & a much higher ABV. Some of the yeast will continue working for a long, long time.

1.030 would be extremely sweet. (Mix 1 oz. of honey in 4 ounces of water and add 3 oz. of 80 proof vodka.) I've had meads that finished at 1.020 & that was excessive for my tastes. 1.010 is about right.

Thanks guys, I'll dial it back a bit. I emailed Lalvin's cust. service, we'll see what they have to say about their product. I don't mind letting this one age for a long time if need be. I really liked the way the D 47 worked on my Apfelwein, and it definitely didn't ferment out quickly or leave any hot flavors there. Took almost 8 weeks at right around 72º to finish up that recipe.

FWIW: I've made many sweet meads that aren't cloyingly sweet. I use Edme ale yeast (Safale S-33) and 3lbs of honey per gallon of final mead (so 15lbs for a 5 gallon carboy).

S-33 craps out around 12-13% ABV, and is pretty clean fermenting, so you get a pretty good mead with just 6 months of aging.

OK, I guess I'm an experimenter, and I picked up 15lbs of clover honey at Costco, so I'm going to use this honey and the D 47. I think I might like to add some orange, like the bitter kind, and some cinnamon. What's the best way to do that? Should I make a "tea" with, uh guessin' here, like .5 oz of bitter orange peel and 2-3 cinnamon sticks?

Is nutrient necessary with all meads? I saw it was needed for some yeasts, but not others.

ma2brew said:

OK, I guess I'm an experimenter, and I picked up 15lbs of clover honey at Costco, so I'm going to use this honey and the D 47. I think I might like to add some orange, like the bitter kind, and some cinnamon. What's the best way to do that? Should I make a "tea" with, uh guessin' here, like .5 oz of bitter orange peel and 2-3 cinnamon sticks?

Is nutrient necessary with all meads? I saw it was needed for some yeasts, but not others.

Click to expand...

Nutrient really is essential with all meads- there are very little yeast nutrients in honey, so the yeast really need them with all meads, unless there is a ton of fruit or other "food" for the yeast.

I have no idea about the orange peel tea, sorry!

YooperBrew said:

Nutrient really is essential with all meads- there are very little yeast nutrients in honey, so the yeast really need them with all meads, unless there is a ton of fruit or other "food" for the yeast.

I have no idea about the orange peel tea, sorry!

Click to expand...

Cool, I'll see about picking up some nutrient at the LHBS tomorrow. I hope they have some. I'm going to pick up some orange peel too, just cuz. I figure giving it (a half oz of peel) a boil and steep in a couple cups of water should sanitize it enough, along with the cinnamon, to toss in the carboy for a while for aroma/flavoring. At least I hope that works. If they don't have the nutrients in stock I'll wait.

Thanks Yoop!

ETA:
Ok, I worked this up in Beer Alchemy. 15lbs of honey in the carboy with water added to make 5 gallons should yield an OG of 1.095. FG should come in at 0.999, and the ABV should come in at 13%, which is below the max tolerance of the D 47.

Just got back from the LHBS with a new stir thingy, the steel rod with "wings" on the end that I can chuck in the drill, as well as a bottle of yeast nutrient.

Should be a fun and productive weekend. My wife and I will make her Chardonnay kit, and I can make this mead, and hopefully she'll help bottle up my ale.

I decided against adding anything to my mead, so this first one's going to be a very a very basic mead.
-15lbs of clover honey
-1 packet of Lalvin D 47 yeast (11 grams), rehydrated
-Yeast nutrient, but I'm only doing 50% of the amount at first, with the rest in a couple days
-Water to make 5 gallons

That's it.

Pitched the D 47 @ 19:15 EST, and I only added 3 teaspoons of nutrient to begin with.
OG was 1.112, corrected for ambient temp it's 1.113.
I only added 3.5 gallons of water to make 5 gallons total volume.
Looks like the ABV will come in around 15% if the yeast will handle it, if not I might have some residual sweetness yet.

I guess Beer Alchemy didn't account properly for the volume of the honey...
ETA: a picture

The head on that was just the foam from the stirring I did with my new Mix-Stir (the stainless one)

ETA:
Update!!! I've got airlock activity. About 3.5 hours after pitching, it going at about 1 bubble every 100 seconds. I expect this to pick pick up quickly (as in the next 8 hours).

Just a little update...

Have I ever mentioned I love this D 47 yeast? After using it for Apfelwein I was happy for a couple reasons:
1) I never had the dreaded sulphur stench that so many get using Montrachet. While I wouldn't call it empiric evidence by any means, many using the Montrachet claim that they don't get the funky smells when they add nutrient either. Reading up on wine yeasts a little more, particularly recently while learning some more about mead basics, I see that the pushing the yeast can produce the sulphur, but most wines are ok with that and the smell goes away on its own, given time.

2) I have had a couple evenings where I had more than a few glasses of AW, and I have had none of the associated problems the following morning that so many attribute to AW. Again, I have no proof of this, but I am beginning to think that the Montrachet is contributing some fusels that are making mornings tough on some ApfelWein fans.

D 47 doesn't have near the same initial activity that the Montrachet does, but it is a relatively potent fermenting yeast, with a higher tolerance level than the Red Star product, and have to say I'm more than pleased with it. I bought a packet of Montrachet, and I'll have to make a new carboy of AW soon using it, but I'm going to be bummed if my assumptions come to fruition, and I've got 5 gallons of AW that isn't as good as my first batch . I guess any AW is good though, right?