Fleischmann's Active Yeast?

[ealu-scop]

Hi mead heads.

My brother and I sort of spur of the moment made a couple gallons of mead the other day. Our first time. I had the equipment and he had the honey. He'd researched the recipe and the process and I tried to do a crash course a few hours before (remember, it was spur of the moment!).

When I got there he had Fleischmann's Active Yeast, which I know as more of a bread yeast. My gut reaction was thinking we should have a different kind of yeast, one geared more towards mead, but we didn't have any options at that point.

Now I did a quick google search and found that folks had done it before but I didn't find much in the way of how it worked out. Yesterday I remembered I had an account here from some years back (the place looks different!) and I received a lot of wisdom in my first beer brewing here and figured folks round here might be able to drop some knowledge.

Did we screw up our first mead or do you suppose things will work out ok?

 

[Maylar]

There is a popular mead recipe called Joe's Ancient Orange Mead (JAOM) that uses bread yeast. I've got up to 15% ABV from it. Doesn't flocculate well but it works.

 

[Northern_Brewer]

Could always add a better-floccing yeast like Nottingham to help it drop if that was a concern.

 

[ealu-scop]

My ears are still wet. What's floccing?

 

[Maylar]

My ears are still wet. What's floccing?

Short for "flocculation" - how well the yeast settles to the bottom of the fermentor when the ferment is done. Some ale yeasts like Nottingham form a tight compact sediment (called lees) that's easily left behind when you rack the mead to a new container. Bread yeast tends to leave a loose fluffy lees that stirs up into a cloud when disturbed, making racking or bottling more of a chore.

 

[Northern_Brewer]

Technically flocculation is merely how well yeast stick together and not how well they drop out - you do get some yeast that do the former and not the latter, but in general brewers think of them as a single process.

Mixing a good-floccing yeast and a bad-floccing yeast allows the former to stick to the latter and drop it - a lot of British traditional breweries use such a combination, as the bad-floccing yeast tend to attenuate better and are often more flavourful, but you need good floccing for cask ale.

 

[ealu-scop]

Technically flocculation is merely how well yeast stick together and not how well they drop out - you do get some yeast that do the former and not the latter, but in general brewers think of them as a single process.

Mixing a good-floccing yeast and a bad-floccing yeast allows the former to stick to the latter and drop it - a lot of British traditional breweries use such a combination, as the bad-floccing yeast tend to attenuate better and are often more flavourful, but you need good floccing for cask ale.

Ah, thank you. Much appreciated.