Near-Beer-Engineer
Well-Known Member
I'll be honest, this is my first mead (although I've done several batches of beer before). I've got my mom hooked on all this fermentation stuff, so we're gonna try to make a sweet mead together. My understanding of sweet meads is that plenty of sugar (honey) is added, and the yeast (Wyeast 4184 Sweet Mead in this case) attenuates down to its alcohol tolerance (11%), leaving some residual sweetness behind, since fermenting this extra amount would cause the yeast to have to go past its alcohol limit. Thus it is a SWEET mead!
So my (probably very dumb) question is this... If there is residual sugar in a sweet mead, and yeast only ferments to 11% ABV, can I simply dilute the fermented mead to say 10% or 10.5% ABV with water, bottle the mead, and have the yeast just ferment that residual sugar back down to 11%?? Is priming sugar even needed?
I suppose this won't work if all the yeast suddenly die when they reach the 11% mark, but I'd imagine probably a pretty good chunk of them are still swimming around dormant.
Am I crazy?
So my (probably very dumb) question is this... If there is residual sugar in a sweet mead, and yeast only ferments to 11% ABV, can I simply dilute the fermented mead to say 10% or 10.5% ABV with water, bottle the mead, and have the yeast just ferment that residual sugar back down to 11%?? Is priming sugar even needed?
I suppose this won't work if all the yeast suddenly die when they reach the 11% mark, but I'd imagine probably a pretty good chunk of them are still swimming around dormant.
Am I crazy?