Mead (what else!)

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MadMarty911

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So I'm reading amounts of honey for dry, semisweet and sweet mead. I'm wanting a semi sweet but I know that yeast eats trough all available sugar no? Or is there a point where you stop the yeast for a semi sweet/sweet.
Thanks for helping a newb. (making a 5 gallon simple mead tomorrow!)
 
There are a few ways of getting the sweetness right.

You could pick a yeast that only ferments to a certain alcohol level and then add slightly more honey than is necessary to get to that level.

Or you could step feed the must. As the yeast consume all the honey you keep adding small amounts of additional honey until they reach their ceiling and die. Then you add enough honey to achieve the desired sweetness. This is good for high ABV yeasts since they sometimes can't handle the high original gravity levels required to reach their ceiling.

Or you could wait until all the honey is consumed and then stabilize the must by adding potassium sorbate and metabisulfate. This stops the fermentation and then you can add a bit of honey to taste.

I hope these options clear it up some. Maybe there are other techniques but those are the ones that come to my mind right now. Much of it depends on how high you want your final alcohol level to be.
 
There are several ways you can go about this.

First look up what the limits are for a yeasts ABV tolerance. For instance Lalvin 71b is 14%. so you know that if you have more sugars in the must that would create a higher ABV then your yeast will poop out early and you will have left over sugars. The downside to that is that you end up with really high ABV percentage and may have to age your mead 1-2 years before you want to even try and taste it.

Secondly you can back sweeten your mead. This means that you let it ferment dry. Then add potassium sorbate and crushed Camden tablets which will stop further yeast growth/fermentation and then can freely add honey to taste.

Lastly you can ferment dry and then sweeten with artificial sweeteners like splenda.

I suggest the second option personally. Or find a recipe that lends itself to do well dry. Also look up JAOM. It is a fun recipe that does finish semi sweet to kinda sweet and is one of the few recipes that you do nothing special to like the above and it is drinkable in 3 months and loads better after 6 months.
 
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