OK so the fermentation went off very well, I started with OG 1.087. I am now left with a liquid full of CO2 with a hot burning alcohol flavor sitting in a plastic bucket. The instructions that came with my kit say to crush up a few camden tablets and add to the mead to protect it from oxydation and rack it to my carboy. I would like to sweeten it up a bit and have some wild honey for this purpose, how would I make sure it will not ferment the new honey and do I need to sterilize this honey to protect from infection? I have also some bentonite and sparkolloid, will these be necessary and if so at what point would I add them.
I am looking for an order of operations if someone can help.
I have taken a sample to ensure fermentation is complete. After measurement I added a tiny bit of honey to sweeten it up a bit and wow did it come alive, fixed the thin mouth feel and beat back the rubbing alcohol flavor, very excited to put a bottle of this on a dinner table.
Thanks everyone for your help.
Ian
You don't list a full recipe or ingredients, so there's various presumptions here.....
It's finished it's ferment, fine. Presuming that you didn't use mega amounts of honey i.e. enough so that the batch will have exceeded the alcohol tolerance of the yeast, means that it will need stabilising, especially as you mention that you want to back sweeten.
You can rack to carboy, adding the stabilising chems (sulphite/campden tablet and sorbate) and then just let it clear - or if you're feeling impatient add the stabilising chems, then after a day or two, mix in the finings (I'd go with the sparkolloid). Then once it's clear, you can mix in the honey, incrementally (I use a 50/50 mix of honey and water as it mixes in more easily and only a little at a time, measuring gravity after each little bit of the sweetener incorporated).
I like my meads at about 1.010 when finished, but because you can sometimes get a haze from adding the honey to sweeten and I'm too lazy and impatient to have to clear a batch twice (plus I make mostly 1 gallon batches so don't want too much racking losses), I usually rack off the sediment, then add the stabilising chems, then a day or so later back sweeten to about the level I like, then either leave it to clear or a couple of days after, hit it with finings. Any excess liquid remaining is kept in a 2 litre pop/soda bottle in the fridge for topping up.
It's then racked of the final sediment as clear (if I pick up a tiny amount of sediment I don't worry), top it up into a 1 gallon jar/carboy and then just seal with a bung and bulk age it - a minimum of 6 months, often much longer.
The (presumably) "alcohol hot" taste will mellow with time (if the flavour you describe is fusels, rather than alcohol hot, then it will take longer to mellow - bad fusels sometimes won't mellow at all, but you have to wait and see about that, it's rare unless you used D47 and fermented at over 70F/21C).
The ageing is necessary, as a lot of young meads taste bloody horrible, but with a bit of ageing it's like a completely different drink. If you did find that it's recovered a bit too much honey character after 6 months ageing, you can also balance that with a bit of acid (I like to use a 2 parts malic, 1 part tartaric for traditional meads).
