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You can always use fruit juice or tea to replace water when making a mead (apple juice will give you what is known as a cyser), but you need to be aware that fruit juices generally have a gravity of around 1.045 - 1.055 or the equivalent of about about 1 lb of sugar per gallon of juice. If you...

My preference for chocolate flavors in a mead is to boil about 4 oz of chocolate malt (roasted barley) per gallon. The barley is so well roasted that it will produce no fermentable sugars but the chocolate flavor is very pronounced. Since you strain the grains before you add the "tea" to your...

Most country wines - and that includes mead, typically require back sweetening to help bring forward the flavors that the alcohol tends to mask. To back sweeten effectively, the amount of sweetener a wine needs depends on several factors, including, your preference, the acidity (TA), the ABV...

Adding tannin and acid will very likely help BUT the bigger problem is the selection of apples. Most cider apples you would not want to eat because they don't taste anything like what you are looking for when you buy eating apples - they may be very mealy , very sour, and the apple flavors are...

I ate the cheese and am still here. I am still uncertain about the nature of this blue mold but I now believe it may be on some of the plastic draining material I use to keep the bottom of the cheese above the bottom of the containers I age the cheese in in my cheese cave. Found another cheese -...

cider 12 months to experience the incredible transformation.

=But check the temperatures at which honey caramelizes. Many folk burn their honey and call that carbon caramelization. It ain't. Carbon (burnt sugar), like burnt toast ain't tasty. It tastes like crap. Bochet has complex flavors. None taste like burnt toast.

at a gravity of 1.000 it's ready for racking.

For a primary you really don't need a blow-off or airlock /bubbler. Simply cover the opening with a clean cloth. You are not brewing beer. Fruit is not nearly as susceptible to laco-bacteria infections as grains (which are covered in the bacteria). For your secondary, you DO need an airlock and...

If the wine is saturated with CO2 the gas will keep all the particulates in suspension. Have you fully degassed?

At what temperature will a 12% wine freeze? Ethanol freezes at minus 173 F. Most home wine makers and would be distillers don't have equipment that will freeze that low. So, the cost of freezing ethanol would likely be far higher than the cost of boiling the liquid and collecting what condenses

But sulfur has a very recognizable odor. If there is no smell of rotten eggs (or sewer gas) - ie hydrogen sulfide, then the problem may be simply that the mead is brut dry and that what you say is bitterness is the ethanol. Most country wine makers back sweeten and to do that you need first to...

Not a calculator but a rule of thumb. Table sugar at 1 lb dissolved in water to make 1 US gallon will raise the gravity of the water by 45 points (1.045) - assume 1 lb = 453.6 g and 1 US gallon = 3785.4 ml.

so we are talking about 800 ml of meead or about 1/5 of a gallon (US)? So about the equivalent of 35 oz of honey in one US gallon or slightly more than a starting gravity of 1.070- 1.080 from only the honey, then I would think that this may have stalled. You may want to upturn the process to see...

If you are adding fruit, you may want to add pectic enzyme 12 hours before you plan to pitch your yeast. Pectic enzyme - NOT pectins. You want to break down the pectins in the fruit and not add to them: I make jam and never add pectin because most fruit has more than enough pectin to make jam...

Hi, sven.vandevenn and welcome. Sorry but not enough information. Not clear what the volumes you are referring to in fact are. 3/4 of what? A quarter of what? Milk rather than whey has a great deal of fat and other proteins so the gravity you may have taken will not accurately reflect the sugar...

A question. I culture all my milk with whey from kefir I make from grains. I don't drink kefir so I have enough kefir to make a hard cheese about once every three weeks. I noticed a few days ago that one of the batches of hard kefir cheese i had been aging had developed blue mold. I have not...

Right but what's the proof or ABV? You don't normally drink spirits at 70% ABV (140 proof) and you don't normally drink what you buy (typically at 40% (80 proof) just hot off the still. If you are distilling a wine at say 12% and you are distilling a gallon, then if you captured about 400 ml...

My preference is always to rack just before active fermentation ceases. The CO2 that the yeast is pumping out will help protect your mead (or wine ) from oxidation. If you rack after the yeast have quit and your siphoning protocol is weak (your siphon is high in the target carboy , for example)...

I dunno. When I make elderflower wine, mine come in 2 oz packs and I use 1 oz for every gallon (US) I make. I prefer elderflower wine to mead but I would use the same amount of dried flowers per gallon of mead. My go to is about 12% ABV (so a scant 3 lbs of honey).