1 year old mead "tasteless?"

[Reject86]

Hi guys.

I attempted to brew a mead roughly a year ago, not sure which recipe I used but it was a very simple honey water yeast mix. Anyways this has been brewing in my demijohn for roughly a year now, today I decided to bottle the batch from the large demijohn it had been sitting in into 2 smaller ones and really just wanted to check how it was going.

To be honest I'm very disappointed in it at the minute, it has a sort of sweet cider smell to the mead but has no real flavour no bitterness or sweetness to it. Don't get me wrong you can tell from the taste that there's alcohol there but that's about it. If I had to sum the taste up id say really watered down Apple cider.

Is there anything I can do to give it some flavour at this point? I don't really want to chuck it out.

Any points greatly appreciated. Jamie

 

[outside92129]

Some folks add some acid blend to mead, others back-sweeten, and some carbonate. I'm very new to the meadery, working on my first batch now as well. From what i've researched a combination of the first two will improve your mead.

 

[zippybasher]

Add your favorite Fruit or some Juice?
You can always just add some juice to your own glass when your pour, that way you can try different flavors without having a whole batch of "X" mead (Cyser).

I do my cider this way; want it Dry? just pour a glass... Want it sweet? add a bit of juice to glass and then pour....

 

[bernardsmith]

Do you know what variety of honey you used? Sounds like (and I am just guessing here) the mead has fermented brut dry and your preference is for something sweeter. What you might do is stabilize the mead by adding K-meta and K-sorbate and then add some flavor-rich honey. You might try adding orange-blossom honey, for example. One pound of honey added to five gallons of liquid will raise the gravity by 8 points ( 4 oz will raise the gravity of 1 gallon by 10 points) You may want to bench test to see if you prefer your mead to be less than 10 points or as much as 20...

I agree with outside92129- that your mead may need some acidity but you can tell that by taste or you can measure the TA to see how acidic it is (typically non grape white wines are about .55% - .65%).

 

[fuelish]

Reject, do you have gravity readings for original gravity and where it is now??? ...or can you give us an approximation of how many lbs of honey you used and batch size??? You could try letting it age on some toasted oak for a bit....you could let it sit on some fresh grated ginger root for a bit (I am over the moon with fresh ginger, love it....works well with habaneros and oak in mead )...you could stabilize and back sweeten as mentioned above, or mix it with juice/Sprite/Ginger Ale/whathaveyou as mentioned above. If you went light on the honey in the first place and it fermented dry, it's going to be kinda bland, flavorwise, but that's the nature of a simple plain mead, especially if you went light on the honey.
OR, you could keep making batches of various mead and reserve this batch for topping up fermentors after racking...nothing wrong with that scenario