Bottling mead like beer?

Hello all--

I'm about ready to bottle my first-ever batch of mead. (I've got about a dozen batches of beer under my belt... figuratively and literally... ) I pretty much followed Papazian's Barkshack Gingermead recipe. My fermentables for a 5 gal batch were 7.5 lb honey, 1.5 lb corn sugar, and 2.25 lb raspberries. Added Red Star champagne yeast and away it went. So far so good.

I was planning to bottle my mead just as I would bottle beer: 5 oz priming sugar, 12 oz bottles, regular bottlecaps, etc. However, my local homebrew supply guy told me that I can't do that, because the champagne yeast will blow my bottles up. I've read up as much as I can on the topic and I think he's wrong. An online mead calculator told me that I should be at about 9.5% ABV. My champagne yeasties should have ripped through every bit of fermentable sugar in the months since brew day. So by bottling time my only fermentable sugars will be a standard 5 oz dose of corn sugar. I don't see why champagne yeast would make way more CO2 than beer yeast out of the same amount of priming sugar.

That being said, I'd really like to have someone who knows what they're doing reassure me that I'm not going to be turning my whole batch of mead into grenades.

Thanks in advance for any useful thoughts, and even for the not-so-useful ones!

--Beaneater

I have not personally bottle carbed my mead...

On purpose.

However, I did end up with a sparkling version of Cinnamon Mead when, after crushing some cinnamon candy into secondary and letting it ferment out, I still ended up with carbed mead. I bottled most with corks.

I'd take a gravity reading and make sure you got as much of the sugar fermented as you think you should have. After that I don't think it will hurt to carb like beer. No matter what yeast you use, it's (supposedly) eaten all of the sugars it's going to by the time you add priming sugar. And priming sugar is a simple sugar, and the yeast should pretty much eat all of it, even beer yeast.

My only concern would be the sugars left in the mead slowly being eaten by the yeast over several weeks. Eventually they might be enough extra to cause an over-carb situation. But it's probably not likely to create a bottle bomb if you are careful and take readings and give it enough time to finish up before priming.

Beaneater said:

Hello all--

I'm about ready to bottle my first-ever batch of mead. (I've got about a dozen batches of beer under my belt... figuratively and literally... ) I pretty much followed Papazian's Barkshack Gingermead recipe. My fermentables for a 5 gal batch were 7.5 lb honey, 1.5 lb corn sugar, and 2.25 lb raspberries. Added Red Star champagne yeast and away it went. So far so good.

I was planning to bottle my mead just as I would bottle beer: 5 oz priming sugar, 12 oz bottles, regular bottlecaps, etc. However, my local homebrew supply guy told me that I can't do that, because the champagne yeast will blow my bottles up. I've read up as much as I can on the topic and I think he's wrong. An online mead calculator told me that I should be at about 9.5% ABV. My champagne yeasties should have ripped through every bit of fermentable sugar in the months since brew day. So by bottling time my only fermentable sugars will be a standard 5 oz dose of corn sugar. I don't see why champagne yeast would make way more CO2 than beer yeast out of the same amount of priming sugar.

That being said, I'd really like to have someone who knows what they're doing reassure me that I'm not going to be turning my whole batch of mead into grenades.

Thanks in advance for any useful thoughts, and even for the not-so-useful ones!

--Beaneater

Click to expand...

If the mead has fermented dry. (all the fermentable sugars have fermented) and the yeast is till viable then you can bottle carb the mead just like you would a cider or beer.

Add a planned amount of simple sugars, viable yeast ferment this producing CO2 that remains in the bottle/beverage.

If it's a sweet mead that the yeast have reached their ABV tollerance then this is not an option.

Similarly if you have stabilized the mead to have it sweet then this is not an option without new yeast being added and pasteurization mid carb.

I don't bottle carb my mead, but I do my stout with priming sugar and never had a bomb.. have used champagne yeast in mead also and zero bottle bombs there either =)

Your mead -assuming is dry - should be about 10% ABV (9 lbs sugar/5 = 1.8 bs/gallon = 1.8* .040 = 1.072 = 9.4%ABV (plus the sugar and water from the berries). Champagne yeast won't blink fermenting that concentration of sugar or living in that amount of alcohol. If there is no sugar left before you prime then the only CO2 you are generating is from the 5 oz of priming sugar... BUT 9 lbs of sugar (excluding the fruit) will produce 4.5 lbs of CO2. Not pressure , but weight, and depending on your protocol much , most, all or very little of that CO2 will still be in the mead.. what wine makers (and mead makers) do - if they do not age their meads and wines is to manually de-gas to remove most or all of the trapped CO2. You can do that by stirring vigorously (perhaps use a degassing rod attached to a drill) or by pulling a vacuum (about 22 -25 inches). De-gasing is best done at temperatures around 70-75 F. (de-gasing is NOT aerating)
The problem for folk who cork their mead is not bombs but popped corks and concomitant loss of the mead. I suspect that the crown caps will not pop... in which case it IS possible (not likely but still possible) that you MAY have exploding bottles.. The solution is to de-gas and then any CO2 you produce by priming will be the only CO2 in the bottle...

Thanks to all so far for the very helpful responses. I think the general upshot is that there's nothing magical about champagne yeast that's going to create more CO2 than beer yeast would out of the same amount of sugar.

Homercidal, this is the part where I make an embarrassing admission. I don't do gravity readings. I don't think I even own a hydrometer anymore. I just let my primary sit for a good long while (a month or so) and then bottle or rack. It hasn't failed me yet (he said, with fingers crossed).

bernardsmith, your very informative post got me thinking:

bernardsmith said:

Your mead -assuming is dry - should be about 10% ABV (9 lbs sugar/5 = 1.8 bs/gallon = 1.8* .040 = 1.072 = 9.4%ABV (plus the sugar and water from the berries). Champagne yeast won't blink fermenting that concentration of sugar or living in that amount of alcohol.

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This has been fermenting since Sept 2015, so I can hardly imagine that the yeasties haven't finished doing their thing by now. Then again, all my experience is with beer yeast, and maybe champagne yeast works more slowly...?

bernardsmith said:

If there is no sugar left before you prime then the only CO2 you are generating is from the 5 oz of priming sugar... BUT 9 lbs of sugar (excluding the fruit) will produce 4.5 lbs of CO2. Not pressure , but weight, and depending on your protocol much , most, all or very little of that CO2 will still be in the mead..

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That's an interesting point. My "protocol", which is laughably short of being worthy of the name, is that of a beer brewer: let it rest peacefully because you don't want to oxidize it. I gather that may not have been the right move for mead...?

bernardsmith said:

what wine makers (and mead makers) do - if they do not age their meads and wines is to manually de-gas to remove most or all of the trapped CO2. You can do that by stirring vigorously (perhaps use a degassing rod attached to a drill) or by pulling a vacuum (about 22 -25 inches). De-gasing is best done at temperatures around 70-75 F. (de-gasing is NOT aerating)

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Very interesting. And it leads me to another question. My beers presumably have dissolved CO2 too -- not as much because they have ~50% of the fermentables per volume when compared to my mead, but it's still there. I've never heard of anyone de-gassing their beer before priming and bottling (I've surely never done it, anyway) so it stands to reason that the CO2 in the finished bottle is partly residual dissolved CO2 from the primary fermentation and partly new CO2 from the priming sugar. And that has always led to nicely carbed beers. So I wonder -- if I don't de-gas my mead but use less priming sugar (to compensate for higher-than-normal-for-me levels of residual dissolved CO2), will it even out in the end?

bernardsmith said:

The problem for folk who cork their mead is not bombs but popped corks and concomitant

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Excellent word choice.

bernardsmith said:

loss of the mead. I suspect that the crown caps will not pop... in which case it IS possible (not likely but still possible) that you MAY have exploding bottles.. The solution is to de-gas and then any CO2 you produce by priming will be the only CO2 in the bottle...

Click to expand...

I agree with you that the bottles are likely to fail before the crown caps. (See Mythbusters "exploding lava lamp" episode for entertaining anecdotal evidence.)

Again, thanks to you all. I have more confidence now that there's nothing wrong in principle with bottling this mead as if it were beer despite the use of champagne yeast.

Cheers,
Beaneater

Beaneater said:

Homercidal, this is the part where I make an embarrassing admission. I don't do gravity readings. I don't think I even own a hydrometer anymore. I just let my primary sit for a good long while (a month or so) and then bottle or rack. It hasn't failed me yet (he said, with fingers crossed).

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All I can say to that is good luck. In my experience even a month of fermentation is no guarantee that the yeast have completed their job. There are a lot of variables that go into a fermentation and not all of them are easily controlled.

I think it's worth the money to buy a hydrometer, and worth the time to use it.

I will admit that I don't always use a hydrometer, but I'm usually kegging beer, so the chance of bottle bombs is quite low.

Homercidal said:

All I can say to that is good luck. In my experience even a month of fermentation is no guarantee that the yeast have completed their job. There are a lot of variables that go into a fermentation and not all of them are easily controlled.

I think it's worth the money to buy a hydrometer, and worth the time to use it.

I will admit that I don't always use a hydrometer, but I'm usually kegging beer, so the chance of bottle bombs is quite low.

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Thanks for the response, Homercidal. I did mention that this was an embarrassing admission, right?

I guess I have had good luck so far. I have to admit that (despite the fact that taking hydrometer readings is obviously dead-standard brewing procedure) I'm a little paranoid about repeatedly opening up my fermenter and dunking in some implement that has supposedly been sanitized by a semi-reliable character like me.

Anyway, I'm getting off-topic here. I'll reflect on the wisdom of my hydrometerophobic ways.

EDIT: By the way, I'm having dinner tonight with a friend of the family who's a Ferris State graduate. And I recently discovered the joys of Kung Fury. Good times!

Just as an aside wine and mead makers generally use K-meta (potassium meta-bisulphite) as their sanitizer. K-meta produces SO2 (sulfur dioxide) and sulfur dioxide kills wild yeast and bacteria (when they are present in small populations)... so given the pH of wine and mead, and given the amount of alcohol in the wine or mead we really are not very anxious about sampling the liquor to test the gravity and returning the sample to the fermenter or carboy... Brewers tend to be far more anxiety prone about the idea of testing the gravity continually throughout fermentation... but then brewers use peroxide to sanitize..
Mind you, we tend to be a little more neurotic about oxidation than brewers... You rarely see a carboy that is not filled to the tippy top in a wine maker's shop. You rarely see a full carboy in a home brewery..

Beaneater said:

However, my local homebrew supply guy told me...

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The problem with listening to the guys at the homebrew shop is the same as listening to people online, they might sound like they know what they're talking about, but usually they've spent more time BSing than researching.

Make sure fermentation is done, and use a priming sugar calculator if you're unsure of what you're doing. I use about 3.5 oz sugar for a five gallon batch, and have had some bottles burst. Plastic totes are your friends...

Hey DREWery, thanks for the response.

theDREWery said:

Make sure fermentation is done, and use a priming sugar calculator if you're unsure of what you're doing. I use about 3.5 oz sugar for a five gallon batch,

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Just to be clear, are you talking about beer or mead here?

You'll be fine.

I've done it recently, and it's fine. Still drinking them.

Just calculate your priming sugar relatively well (I think I did about 1/3c honey to about 3 gallons). and ferment dry.

If you want sweet and carbed, bottle pasteurization as described on the forums will probably work. Use a stainless steel pot with a steel lid. I had a bottle explode during pasteurization of cider, but nothing exploded post-pasteurization. Probably pasteurized about 100 bottles so far.

The process for brewing and carbing are pretty much the same across the board. The only weird situations are when you use grains or are making a mash.

Srsly. You will be fine.

Beaneater said:

My champagne yeasties should have ripped through every bit of fermentable sugar in the months since brew day. So by bottling time my only fermentable sugars will be a standard 5 oz dose of corn sugar. I don't see why champagne yeast would make way more CO2 than beer yeast out of the same amount of priming sugar.

Click to expand...

Also, they DON'T. CO2 production is not a more/less thing based on the yeast. It's a matter of how much sugar they eat. It's a simple chemical reaction, so the yeast aren't "magically" making CO2 out of the ether.

The difference is how much effort those yeasts will go through to get every last drop of sugar out of a solution, and how much alcohol they can tolerate in the medium they're in. Champagne yeast has a high tolerance to alcohol, which means that in an alcohol heavy solution, they're more likely to survive and keep fermenting away as long as sugar is in the solution.

The "dryness" champagne yeast gives is also a function of how willing they are to survive and eat away every last ounce of sugar, whereas other yeasts are lazier and after hitting, say a gravity of 1.001,decide "ehhhhh... Most of the food is gone, time to flocculate and go to sleep"

So regardless of the strain of yeast, once it's as dry as it is going to get, as long as your alcohol levels aren't at the threshold of your yeast strain, the priming sugar added will result in a specific amount of fermentation, and a resultant amount of alcohol and a resultant measure of carbonation.

You CAN screw up these calculations by tossing in a different strain of yeast when priming.

FOR EXAMPLE:

Let say you brew a brew to 10% ABV with a riesling yeast. (riesling would be a sweeter wine, so chances are it's going to end with a fairly sweet end product. I've never used a yeast like this, but it's just a theoretical example. For the sake of argument, let's say it ends with a 1.009 SG).

You toss in your priming sugar, enough to raise the SG by say .001 and then because you're worried your yeast might not overcome that ABV level and you don't want a stuck fermentations as you bottle. You use champagne yeast.

Well, champagne yeast has different brewing habits. It finishes drier and it really makes an effort to burn through sugar without abandon (champagne yeast and premier cuvee are two types that have these habits and are often used to "unstuck" ferments).

So the champagne yeast burns through that .001 SG points that you added for a priming, and then further goes through another .015 points to finish at .994 as your final gravity.

Except... All your bottles explode as they are primed now at 16 times what your goal carbonation level was.

(and again, don't get hung up on the numbers... I only try to use some numbers off the top of my head to demonstrate a point).

It's best to work with a singular strain of yeast until you get the hang of it...

(and then there's some strains out there like the BM 4x4 which is pretty nice but also is very happy to let malo-lactic fermentation take place, which, different fermentation, but then also releases CO2 and complicates things).

Hey, thanks for the response, SerifSansSerif.

SerifSansSerif said:

You'll be fine.

I've done it recently, and it's fine. Still drinking them.

Just calculate your priming sugar relatively well (I think I did about 1/3c honey to about 3 gallons). and ferment dry.

Click to expand...

So that would be a little over 1 oz of sugar per gallon (though I can't say I know what percentage of the sugar in honey is fermentable -- pretty darn high, I would assume). Sounds pretty similar to what I plan to do with corn sugar.

SerifSansSerif said:

If you want sweet and carbed,

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Nope, dry and carbed, which should be pretty straightforward.

SerifSansSerif said:

The process for brewing and carbing are pretty much the same across the board. The only weird situations are when you use grains or are making a mash.

Srsly. You will be fine.

Click to expand...

Excellent. Thanks for the encouragement.

"So that would be a little over 1 oz of sugar per gallon (though I can't say I know what percentage of the sugar in honey is fermentable -- pretty darn high, I would assume)."

Refined table sugar is made of 50 percent glucose and 50 percent fructose and <1% Moisture

Honey is also made mostly of sugar, but it's only about 30 percent glucose and about 40 percent fructose, there are also about 20 other sugars in the mix, many of which are much more complex along with some dextrin all of this is suspended in about 18% water. (Rough estimates but good enough for me.)

Due to the water content and other trace non-sugars of Honey 1 pound of Honey is the equivalent of roughly 0.80 pound of sugar.

The notes I gave earlier in this thread were for how I handle beer. I prefer to cork my meads, as they are higher ABV, and benifit from a longer aging. I've had a few crown caps fail after a year or so.

CKuhns said:

"So that would be a little over 1 oz of sugar per gallon (though I can't say I know what percentage of the sugar in honey is fermentable -- pretty darn high, I would assume)."

Refined table sugar is made of 50 percent glucose and 50 percent fructose and <1% Moisture

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I hate this. Sorry. Pet peeve, but table sugar is SUCROSE. It's not 50/50 fructose and glucose. It's not even chemically equivalent. (fructose and glucose are made of the same molecules, yes, but the arrangement, if I remember, are mirrored).

In the process of becoming sucrose, one fructose and one glucose molecule join together but they also free up 1 molecule of water.

Sucrose: C12H22O11
Fructose/glucose C6H12O6
And for the hell of it, Alcohol: C2H6O

Basically, in order to revert (or actually invert) sugar back to glucose and fructose, you need to add water. The sugars in honey might be a little more readily available to yeast to break down (which prefers glucose/fructose over sucrose) and honey tends to have the invertase from the bees to break down the little bit sucrose that does form.

XD

Everything else beyond the sugars themselves is fine. The chemicals though is the bit of irritation.

Also, honey has amylase and other nice enzymes in them, which gets me thinking..... :S