Mead with baking-yeast

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Polygonmaster

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Hello.
I am an inexperienced homebrewer without much access to kits or solfites, so my process for my first badge of mead as been using a must of honey and water and fermenting it using baking-yeast in a plastic-container with an airlock until it stops bubbling, then syphoning to another plastic-container which is closed with a screw-on-cap.
During fermentation I would shake the container quite often to make sure no freash yeast was stuck and useless at the buttom.
It had proven difficult to efficiently remove the yeast, so I decided to add some extra sugar and let the yeast ferment until the ethanol-levels kill it all off.
However after all fermentation had stopped, all yeast removed and it had aged for three months, I broke it out and found that it tasted absolutly horribly sour and barely drinkable.

I read some forum-posts and came to the conclusion that shaking the container during fermentation was a bad idea, so I brewed another badge with about the same process except I moved it as little as possible and I now wait for it to age.

I'd like to taste it and know weather this process yields better results or not, but I'm not sure if I'll be able to tell if I don't let it age for a while.

Any tips for my process?
And how long should I wait before testing it?

Thank you.
 
If you want to use bread yeast, a Joes Ancient Orange Mead (JAOM) is to go to recipe. It is a spiced mead though.

If you want to learn how to make pure honey meads, read my Current Mead Making Techniques article here:

https://www.homebrewtalk.com/current-mead-making-techniques.html

All the good and bad practices are covered there. Come back with any additional questions.

Cheers!
 
Listen to loveofrose.... He knows stuff!

And go read the very long thread on "Joes Ancient Orange Mead". It has a TON about how bread yeast behaves in mead.

One suggestion I can extrapolate from having read that thread is let the mead age a long time before judging whether it sucks or not. Like a year or 18 months! Time heals many off flavors.

I'm also a newbie, but found that one can order yeasts and forgo the frustration of bread yeasts idiosyncracies.
 
Thank you for the help.

I've started three new 2 liter* batches of Joe's Ancient Orange Mead
and I'll se where that goes.

The other batches from before that didn't taste so good I placed in a cool cupboard along with the ones that just finished brewing(Although those are labelled).
I'll let the labelled ones sit for at least 2 months while keeping track of Joe's Ancient and then see where to go from there.

Again thank you for the advice.

*I brew in 2 liter batches because larger containers are difficult to come by... At least those that are designed for food.
 
JAOM is designed to be sweet but most mead will be dry. That is, most mead will have no unfermented sugars left after the yeast has done its job. Honey itself will not be sweet if all the sugars have been fermented off. That means the only flavor that will remain will be the flavor of the honey absent all sweetness. if you like the flavor of the honey you are using (and you need to think about that question) then fine and good, but if you need your mead to taste sweet then after you have finished fermenting the honey you need to stabilize the mead and then add more sweetener. Stabilizing means that the remaining yeast cells will not be able to ferment that added sugar so the mead will taste sweet. But as I said, JAOM is different - it is designed to taste sweet because it is designed so that the yeast will die of alcohol poisoning before they can eat up all the sugar... (wine yeasts have more tolerance for alcohol than bread yeasts and large quantities of honey dissolved in little water are potentially capable of producing a great deal of alcohol - should the yeast have that kind of tolerance)...
 
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