Fermentation started back up

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dan09554

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I just racked my 5g of cherry berry mead to secondary. Gravity reading was 1.000. OG was around 1.090, give or take. When I racked, I put it on 3lbs of pureed strawberries. I suppose I should've figured it would start back up. I had to put on a blowoff tube. Will this dry this mead? Any recommendations? Or will this be just fine?
 
If you want to add fruit to a batch that's finished, to get more of the fruit flavour and/or sweeten, then you need to stabilise it first i.e. sulphites and sorbate.

Which should prevent it from restarting to ferment again.

Apart from that, it should be fine.
 
thanks. So, since I didn't add the sorbate, I'll just let it ferment out. How does a DRY Cherry Berry mead sound? Can I back sweeten with Splenda, or someting similar? Or will it taste good left alone?
 
Well, once it's gone totally dry, you could just back sweeten with honey. The yeast would of drowned it self in it's own alcohol and died if it did it's job well enough. But, if you'd prefer splenda.. that's cool. A lot of people do.
 
Honey would work. Guess I thought it would start fermentation up again then bottle bombs. But if the yeast dies out, that wouldn't be a problem
 
Well... it depends. I don't know if those 3 pounds of strawberries will ferment your mead all the way through (i.e. the yeast would die). I'm pretty sure but.... I would probably want to sorbate, before back sweetening with honey anyways, (if you want to go with the honey thing)
 
Always great tips from fo;ks here in HBT. Sounds like sorbate should be a must have. Do you think this should be backsweetened, or would it be good dry. I've only ever had made and drank JAOM once.
 
What yeast did you use? I just realized I never asked that lol. But umm, judging by the way it's going, if your yeast can tolerate it, it'll end up around 15-17%. I would back sweeten a little, but not too much. A ton of sweetness in high ABV mead can be really overpowering. Or you could back sweeten not at all, if you prefer. After aging though if it's too dry, you could back sweeten then. It sort of makes more sense that way.
 
I used White Labs Sweet Mead Yeast. I suppose I could really just taste it and see if I'd like it sweeter. I used 12 lbs clover honey 4 lbs of strawberries and a half gallon of white grape cherry juice. topped to 5 gal with water
 
Oh well white labs sweet mead only goes up to maybe 13 percent. So if not sweet it at least won't be THAT dry. I would taste it. Now that i think about it it does seem like a lot more sugars than I guesstimated in my head. I HATE when I'm wrong haha. :p
 
No worries. I was wrong once.....Then I divorced her. Your help and advice has been great. Either way, dry or sweet it should still be good
 
Hmm but yeah punching in the SG's into the mead calculator it should stop around .98 or .99 . So actually I wasn't really very off. Maybe...
 

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