can i make mead carbonated?

can i make mead carbonated? like prime it with honey?

You can carbonate a dry mead by priming it with sugar or honey at bottling. For honey you will need 20% more by weight than sugar as honey contains 20% water.

You will not be able to carbonate a sweet mead in this manner. And you will need to bottle in beer or champagne bottles, not wine bottles.

Craig

I think a better solution would be to just use sugar to prime the bottles. Honey is very difficult to really get an accurate amount for priming. And that small amount of sugar will not make much of a difference to your mead.

CBBaron said:

You can carbonate a dry mead by priming it with sugar or honey at bottling. For honey you will need 20% more by weight than sugar as honey contains 20% water.

You will not be able to carbonate a sweet mead in this manner. And you will need to bottle in beer or champagne bottles, not wine bottles.

Craig

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why can't you carbonate a sweet mead? curious

tranceamerica said:

why can't you carbonate a sweet mead? curious

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I haven't made mead before, but this is my guess. Because the mead is a sweet mead, that'd suggest that the sweet flavor comes from additional fermentables that are present. As a result, if you tried to carbonate it, you'd either end up drying out the mead or if you stored it in bottles, the extra fermentables would allow the yeast to create so much carbon dioxide that you'd have bottle bombs to deal with.

Just a guess. I'm no expert.

EinGutesBier said:

I haven't made mead before, but this is my guess. Because the mead is a sweet mead, that'd suggest that the sweet flavor comes from additional fermentables that are present. As a result, if you tried to carbonate it, you'd either end up drying out the mead or if you stored it in bottles, the extra fermentables would allow the yeast to create so much carbon dioxide that you'd have bottle bombs to deal with.

Just a guess. I'm no expert.

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I'm no expert either, but here is my guess. Sweet mead is sweet because there are fermentables present that the yeast were unable to ferment, most likely because they have already reached their alcohol tolerance and stopped working. Since the yeast have stopped working, adding priming sugar does nothing more than add a touch more sweetness.

I suppose one could carbonate sweet mead by bottling prior to fermentation completing, but this would be a dangerous guessing game that could easily result in bottle bombs.

One could always wait until fermentation finished, then keg, force carb and bottle from the keg.

Beerthoven is correct. Sweet mead is sweet because you use less attenuative yeast, or you stall the yeast with potassium metabisulfate.

Dry mead ferments completely, and usually the yeast still has some oomph left, so you prime like normal (like you would with beer).

You *can* make sweet mead via bottle carbing, but its hit and miss. You need an established recipe so you know when you've almost hit the Final Gravity...at which point you bottle and hope it doesn't overcarb and explode.

the downside is a ton of sediment since you skipped secondary.

A better way to make sweet mead is to force carbonate in a keg. You can then buy or make a counter pressure filler to fill bottles, and cap. (oops I see Beerthoven posted that).

My keg'd raspberry melomel is a nicely carbed sweet mead on tap.

ok so u think if i primed a 5 gallon batch with 1 cup dextrose it would blow up if i did it in beer bottles?

Yes, that should work fine.

EvilTOJ said:

Yes, that should work fine.

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i just want it to be lightly carbonated and i do not want it to blow the tops on me

well a cup of sugar will give you higher than average beer carbonation (i think 5oz of corn sugar is only 2/3-3/4 cup).

it won't burst bottles, as long as the mead is FULLY FERMENTED before you bottle.