JAOM Salvagable? FG 1.08

Well I gave a 1 gallon JAOM a try and failed I think. I started one before Thanksgiving this year and I just tested it out today. I do not know what the OG was but I do know that the ingredients were


3# of honey
3 oranges (yeah the big ones....)
2 cloves
1 cinnamon stick
25 rasins

I know the total liquid volume (water + honey) is around 2.5 liters. (those 3 oranges took up a lot of room in the jug)


Anyway the FG is somewhere around 1.08 and is worse than drinking cough syrup.....nasty stuff. Is there any way to bring it down? I'm assuming the OG was way too high to start with and the yeast pooped out because its very alcoholic.



On a lighter note I started a 2.5 gallon batch using blackberries instead of oranges and in 1 month the FG was around 0.99.. tastes pretty good I think.



*edit. Should be 1.008, I read the hydrometer wrong. See 3 posts down.

Someone with more experience with mead will correct me if I'm wrong, but the tends I have seen on this forum is that mead takes a year before it is drinkable, and you might have had too much acid to begin with.

ByCandleLightWinery said:

Someone with more experience with mead will correct me if I'm wrong, but the tends I have seen on this forum is that mead takes a year before it is drinkable, and you might have had too much acid to begin with.

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Yea but JOAM is meant to be ready at around 2 months. I can't really comment on JOAM though because my first batch of it is only a few weeks old and not done.

Ok apparently I failed at reading the hydrometer.

It is actually 1.008.

I just bottled a beer and read 1.11 which made me realize I was off by a decimal. So the beer was 1.011 and the mead was 1.008.

I know meads are meant to age for a very long time. I guess it just threw me off with the blackberry tasting good and the JAOM tasting nasty. The blackberry was started a week after the JAOM so its even younger.

Nothing like jumping in head first :fro:

Some more experienced folks may have other suggestions, but I'd start by racking to another carboy (even though Joe says not to) and top up the liquid to a gallon. Then take an SG reading and a taste test and see where you stand. Probably at that point some aging will help it out. JAOM is supposed to be drinkable in a couple of months, but it also is a very specific recipe and if you deviate from it very much it changes things a lot. I'm thinking with those big oranges and less water in the beginning you're going to need some more time for everything to balance out.

It sounds a lot like a batch of pear nectar wine that I made that had a huge amount of sugar to begin with. For the longest it was just fruit-scented paint thinner but eventually time started working its magic. Now people can actually drink it and not make faces until my back is turned

Your JAO should be fine since 1.08 really isn't too sweet and is certainly within the parameters for this mead. At 5-6 weeks I'm very surprised it's clear enough to bottle though. Yes, JAO is designed to be a quick mead but drinking it at 6 weeks is simply too soon. Put it away and try it again at the end of February. I think your opinion will change. It should be hitting it's stride by Memorial Day.

JAOM only calls for one orange, and Joe only "guaranteed" the recipe if you followed it exactly as he wrote it.

Your pH is probably way off because of the orange overload, plus you have 300% more orange than the recipe calls for. If it were my batch, I would swirl the lees in the carboy, then siphon off half the must to another fermenter, half to another clean one, to get them off of the orange, then I would add a pound of honey to each, then top to a gallon on each, and airlock them both. But that's just what I would do.

3 Oranges with lots of the pith? It might taste a bit bitter from the extra pith. Just a guess though. I used juicing oranges to minimize the pith. Eating oranges seem to have more pith in general.

I'd say that 1.008 isn't done. Rack it and check in another 3 months.

You might also want to backsweeten it if you're topping it up. JAO is supposed to finish on the sweeter side. That much citrus, along with it being semi-dry, will make it seem a lot worse than it really probably is. I made a Kumquat mead JAO style (bread yeast, 3# of honey, raisins, and 2# of kumquats) that turned out really nicely. Was also ready in about 3 months, but tasted better at 6.
The next year I scaled it up and used a wine yeast, which took the mead completely dry. Tasted really bad. Backsweetened to about 1.02 and that improved the mead considerably. It cut the bitterness but kept the tartness.

david_42 said:

I'd say that 1.008 isn't done. Rack it and check in another 3 months.

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I dunno, I've had sweet meads finish at 1.020 before. without a starting gravity its hard to say his ABV and whether the yeast fully attenuated.