Back-sweetening

[jasebrooker]

Hi everyone.

I'm new to the forum so please bear with I started mead making last year and in April I'm getting married. My plan is to use my mead at the wedding but I'm at the point of bottling and it's still a bit too dry for my liking. I used 6 pounds of orange blossom honey to 2 gallons of water.
Now, I've just found some threads talking about back-sweetening and I was wondering if this is something I can do at the bottling stage to bring the sweetness up and, if so, how do I do it!?

Thanks everyone.

J

 

[lutherslagers]

You'll want to retard the yeast with some potassium sorbate or the yeast could chew right through your back sweetening honey. This will also inhibit you from making a carbonated mead unless you force carbonate.

Back sweeten to taste by adding a little honey at a time to your bottling bucket or keg and then sample. How much to recommend is based on your batch size. How much did you make?

 

[jasebrooker]

I have 2 one gallon Demijons (can't get the big five gallon ones in the UK) I'm still new to it all so I'm not planning on trying to carbonate just yet anyway

 

[fatbloke]

5 gallon DJ's here ?

You haven't looked in the right places then. You can find some of the ones that look like water cooler bottles in glass some are 5US gallons/19litre some are 5 Imp gallons/22.5 litres. Any HBS that sells Brupaks stuff can get the ones shown on the Brouwland website up to 54 litres in size and even some of them with tbe wide opening too.

Or while most places don't sell genuine "better bottles" now as they got stupid on how much they were charging you can get a clone of the 22.5 litre size ones.

As for back sweetening ? You would normally stabilise with 1 crushed campden tablet per gallon and 1/2 tsp of potassium sorbate/wine stabiliser per gallon. You can add them at the same time then give it a couple of days later you can back sweeten - which I do incrementally using half honey half water (it mixes in quicker and better but does dilute a little). Add say 125 to 250ml of the sweetener then taste (and measure gravity). If you get to a level of sweetness that tastes good but it seems lacking a little, add a little acid if the batch has fruit in it then use an acid that complements the fruit if it's a traditional I like to use a mix of 2 parts malic and 1 part tartaric.

Oh and sometimes sweetening with honey can cause a haze so have some kwik clear handy (I normally just back sweeten before clearing to about 1.015 then only have to clear my batches once).

 

[jasebrooker]

That sounds good, I'll look into that

So, when I back sweeten with the half honey, half water mix - should I use the same type of honey as what I made it with (ie orange blossom) or can I do this with any type? Also, what is the best way to mix it as I'm sure I read somewhere that I don't want to oxygenate it too much. I was thinking of putting some of the sweetener into another DJ then racking it into it.

 

[fatbloke]

That sounds good, I'll look into that

So, when I back sweeten with the half honey, half water mix - should I use the same type of honey as what I made it with (ie orange blossom) or can I do this with any type? Also, what is the best way to mix it as I'm sure I read somewhere that I don't want to oxygenate it too much. I was thinking of putting some of the sweetener into another DJ then racking it into it.

Good god no. Mix up a half pound of honey with the same volume of water. Then add it 100 or 200 mls at a time. The point of the 50/50 mix is so that you just need to stir it in gently and not for very long. If you use pure honey you often need to stir it a lot or even heat it to get it very runny, both can be harmful.

I tend to use the same honey its made with, but if you could only get say 1kg of the target honey you could get 500gms of something else and just retain some of the target honey to back sweeten and flavour...

Obviously what ever you use is most likely to have influence on the finished flavour......

Oh and while a DJ is convenient to mix in you still have to keep tasting etc so its often better to do the mixing in a bucket then you can see whats going on .....

 

[jasebrooker]

So decant it into a mixing bucket, add the sweetening solution and then decant back into the DJs?