Need help - Is there anyway to make mead without yeast?

[Leon Nguyen]

Hi, i'm totally new to brewing, so please patient with me if i'm asking stupid thing.
I come from Vietnam (by the way, sorry for my bad English) where i can't find any stuff like yeast, or nutrient, etc.. So, may i ask, if there anyway or recipe to make mead without yeast? how much alcohol will it be? how long does it take? I'll be glad to take any advise, please.
At the moment, i have about 1 gallon mix of 1 part honey with 3 part water and a teaspon of sugar. After about 3 days it did star bubleing and a week after it started to look like this.

Up to now it about 3 weeks, it became clear and bubleing is very slow. I did a tasting and it very sweet, with a very little taste of alcohol. Is it fine? normal or anything i need to know? please help

Thanks you for your time.

Link to image (i have no idea how to upload it)
https://photos.app.goo.gl/9SDtG9rVtGJKx9cC7
https://photos.app.goo.gl/X3NoKDzw5tefRn6q9

 

[IslandLizard]

Welcome to HBT!
Your English is fine.

To make mead, you need to add yeast and nutrients. Are you saying you did NOT add any yeast to your mead?

Looking at your pictures, it looks you've got an "infection" there. Some other microbes, other than yeast, are fermenting your mead. That white pellicle floating on the top is a sign of that. Doesn't it taste sour?

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EDIT 07/02/2018:
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[Leon Nguyen]

Yeah, i did not add any yeast to my mixture. I thought that a small amount of sugar will help give a natural yeast a boost, and it did, but the result is unknown (to me, cause i have not taste any true mead before) also i can't find yeast or nutient in my country, so i have no choice.
No, it does not taste sour. It just very sweet and a very little of alcohol.

 

[homebrewer_99]

Definite infection. Sad.

If you can't get champagne yeast try getting some yeast from a baker. They use yeast for bread. It's better than nothing.

 

[RPh_Guy]

You definitely have some wild yeast and probably other microbes living in your mead (as evidenced by the bubbling and pellicle).
25% honey by volume will probably finish sweet no matter what yeast you put in it ("pitch").
Do you have a hydrometer or can you get one?

Can you buy unfiltered/unpasteurized beer, wine, or other alcoholic beverage? There's yeast in them that you can use. The residual yeast in the bottle is called "dregs".

Yeast is everywhere. You can wrangle wild yeast from your environment. The process is a little complicated for a newbie. You create small batches, and either let them sit (open to air but not insects) or you can introduce stuff like fruit of leaves from outside. See which ones taste good and attenuate.

No homebrewing stores in the entire country? Do you have breweries wineries or distilleries?
Can you get bread yeast?

 

[madscientist451]

There are wineries in Vietnam, maybe you could get some white wine yeast from them? Otherwise, I'd make a 6% ABV mead using baker's yeast. Use about 1.25 lbs of honey per gallon of water.
You could also add water to your current wild yeast mead and then add the Baker's yeast to that.
Try to keep it as cool as possible during fermentation.

 

[bernardsmith]

Hi Leon - and welcome. Raw unpasteurized honey is full of yeast so if you make a starter using about 1 lb of honey dissolved in water to make 1 US gallon the amount of sugar /potential alcohol will tend not to stress the yeast and you can grow that yeast so that it will form a working culture that you can then use to make a mead.
That said, honey has very little nutrients that the yeast need so you need to provide them with this. You must be able to find bread yeast (same species just a different variety). Proof a table spoon of bread yeast with some water to which you have added a table spoon of sugar then boil this mixture and when cooled add that to the honey and water solution. After about three days (more or less) the solution should be bubbling away showing that the honey water solution is actively fermenting.

 

[Leon Nguyen]

Unfortunately, in Vietnam, we don't have any homebrewing store, and the only one that sell yeast, they sell a 25kg package.
Thanks for all your advise. I found bread yeast and on my process to cure my mixture. I gave it a good boil, is it normal if it smell like beer??

 

[Leon Nguyen]

You definitely have some wild yeast and probably other microbes living in your mead (as evidenced by the bubbling and pellicle).
25% honey by volume will probably finish sweet no matter what yeast you put in it ("pitch").
Do you have a hydrometer or can you get one?

Can you buy unfiltered/unpasteurized beer, wine, or other alcoholic beverage? There's yeast in them that you can use. The residual yeast in the bottle is called "dregs".

Yeast is everywhere. You can wrangle wild yeast from your environment. The process is a little complicated for a newbie. You create small batches, and either let them sit (open to air but not insects) or you can introduce stuff like fruit of leaves from outside. See which ones taste good and attenuate.

No homebrewing stores in the entire country? Do you have breweries wineries or distilleries?
Can you get bread yeast?

Hi Leon - and welcome. Raw unpasteurized honey is full of yeast so if you make a starter using about 1 lb of honey dissolved in water to make 1 US gallon the amount of sugar /potential alcohol will tend not to stress the yeast and you can grow that yeast so that it will form a working culture that you can then use to make a mead.
That said, honey has very little nutrients that the yeast need so you need to provide them with this. You must be able to find bread yeast (same species just a different variety). Proof a table spoon of bread yeast with some water to which you have added a table spoon of sugar then boil this mixture and when cooled add that to the honey and water solution. After about three days (more or less) the solution should be bubbling away showing that the honey water solution is actively fermenting.

Thanks you, i'm looking forward to learn more about wrangle yeast, making starter.

 

[Miraculix]

You are creating a mead the old school way. Viking mead, only wild yeast, honey and water. The sugar is unnecessary but doesn't do any harm.

You will have to keep this mead in the fermenter for probably more than a year to finish and to be nice, but it might end up as a nice wild mead.

After a few months you might consider racking the mead off the yeast cake at the bottom into a new vessel.

If you are interested in this topic, how to make mead without commercial yeast, I can highly recommend the book "how to brew mead like a Viking".

 

[Leon Nguyen]

Thanks Miraculix

 

[Miraculix]

Thanks Miraculix

You are welcome. You might want to eliminate the large headspace in your fermenter by adding more honey and water and maybe some of the suggested boiled bread yeast as a cheap and easy nutrient.

But please investigate before regarding the amount of honey you want to add as you have already quite a lot inside and this addition might be a possibility to thin out the honey solution a little bit.

 

[Leon Nguyen]

Before, according to many, my mead was infected, i used medical alcohol to clean my stuff, and it did turn out not good enough (due to the infected, i guess) is there any thing i can improve??
Also, i'm about to make new 2 batches, one with the fruit yeast that i have, and one without yeast (let the wild yeast take place). I'm intend to make it pure honey (not with any taste or smell of fruit) and i'd love to use the non boiling way. Is there anything i should take notice on??

 

[biochemedic]

"Infected" doesn't necessarily mean bad. If you want to look at it this way, we intentionally "infect" our must/wort with brewer's yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae. As @bernardsmith mentioned, there are lots of wild yeast in honey, and once you dilute out the sugar, they can become active on their own. Many of these may end up being a variety of different Brettanomyces species, or perhaps other wild Saccharomyces species, many of which can make a very drinkable beverage on their own, and occasionally a downright awesome one. You can also sometimes get Lactobacillus and/or Acetobacter species which can contribute to a pleasant wild fermentation. There are some though, like Pediococcus, which are generally almost always unpleasant.

By the way, since it sounds like you tried to be fairly meticulous with your cleaning/sanitizing, this would further support that you may have just had a wild yeast fermentation going on, probably Brettanomyces based on the appearance of what appeared to be pellicles forming on the surface of your mead.

Bottom line is, it can be hit or miss when you ferment naturally, but it's worth your time to let whatever is going on in that carboy finish up, and see how it tastes. You might be pleasantly surprised!

 

[Leon Nguyen]

Thanks @biochemedic

 

[Leon Nguyen]

Up to now, it been 3 weeks since i made new batch. I just take a sample today. On the hydrometer, i read that it nearly 1.005 in 24 degree Celsius. But using the same thing as hydrometer but it used to measure alcohol content, there is no alcohol in it?? why is that? It taste dry, and a bit sour, but completely no alcohol? Is there anything that i've done wrong?

 

[JimRausch]

Disregard that particular scale. Just use the one that gave you 1.005. If you know your original SG and final SG, you can figure out your alcohol %.

 

[Leon Nguyen]

I mixed 1 part of honey to about 3.5 part of water which gave me a total of 4 litter in volume. At first the gravity was around 1.090, and today is was 1.005. I used fruit yeast, it seem work well (it bubble well for 3 weeks).

 

[JimRausch]

Leon: The formula is OG - FG x 131 = ABV
So at this point your mead is 1.090 - 1.005= 85 x 131= 11.1% alcohol.
It may not be finished though. Often since honey is all simple sugars, mead will ferment down to 1.000 or even lower.
You have done very well!

 

[PeteSeattle]

I don’t know where you are in Vietnam but would this link help for supplies? I looked these up in case I decided to move to Saigon A few years ago.

I know it’s an old post but there is info about brew clubs in Vietnam. Maybe if you ask them they can give you info on how to get supplies locally. There is a link to an online store but don’t know if they are still in business.
https://beervn.com/homebrewing/
Good luck
Cheers

Edit: there’s also a small home brew forum in Vietnam
http://beervn.freeforums.net/
And maybe another store that is in business
http://www.craftbrewer.vn/?___store=vietnamese&___from_store=english

 

[Leon Nguyen]

Leon: The formula is OG - FG x 131 = ABV
So at this point your mead is 1.090 - 1.005= 85 x 131= 11.1% alcohol.
It may not be finished though. Often since honey is all simple sugars, mead will ferment down to 1.000 or even lower.
You have done very well!

Thanks, but i can not taste any alcohol in my mead. What did i miss? or doing wrong?

I don’t know where you are in Vietnam but would this link help for supplies? I looked these up in case I decided to move to Saigon A few years ago.

I know it’s an old post but there is info about brew clubs in Vietnam. Maybe if you ask them they can give you info on how to get supplies locally. There is a link to an online store but don’t know if they are still in business.
https://beervn.com/homebrewing/
Good luck
Cheers

Edit: there’s also a small home brew forum in Vietnam
http://beervn.freeforums.net/
And maybe another store that is in business
http://www.craftbrewer.vn/?___store=vietnamese&___from_store=english

Thanks you, i did visit those, but they're all beer brewer. Many did not even know there are mead or honey wine exist.

 

[bernardsmith]

But you can make an excellent mead using beer yeast; beer nutrients are the same as wine nutrients; and the tools and equipment used to make wines and meads are just about the same as those used to brew beers (brewers tend to prefer use wide mouthed carboys for the entire brewing process, mead and wine makers tend to prefer narrow necked carboys to use as their secondaries (aging is longer for meads and wines and oxidation can be a problem with wide mouth fermenters).

 

[JimRausch]

Thanks, but i can not taste any alcohol in my mead. What did i miss? or doing wrong?

I believe you did nothing wrong. If your specific gravity dropped like it did, then your yeast created alcohol. And, it's actually a good thing that you don't taste any alcohol. The higher chain alcohols called fusels are the ones that tend to give you strong alcohol bite. They are also the ones that tend to give you wicked headaches, so you really don't want those.
Again, I say, you done good sir!
Edit- Yay for me, I finally reached 2000 posts. I know, BFD.......

 

[Leon Nguyen]

Thanks you JimRausch, bernardsmith, and PeteSeattle.

 

[MaaZeus]

If you managed to create a 11% mead with no alcohol taste in such a short time then you did good, REAL good. And you probably have some wicked good yeast there too, worth saving. People usually age their traditional meads for months and even a year or more to get rid of the "rocket fuel" taste. If you can repeat the process with similar results keep doing what you are doing and enjoy your good mead.