Question on making a Perry melomel

[growlrr]

Hi guys - I'm very new to the whole mead making hobby (still racking my first batch), but I am dying to try my hand at a Perry. I plan to make just a gallon with Anjou pears, a little vanilla and cinnamon with either Pasteur Champagne or Lalvin D47 yeast (and recommendations on which one would be better?) Having never done a melomel (or much else), do I need to worry about adding pectic enzymes, acid blend, wine tannin, etc, etc? I'm planning on adding the pears for the primary and then racking off onto another pound of pears and racking to clear on the third. If it sounds like a know what I'm talking about, don't believe it for a second! Any suggestions on time timing for primary, secondary racking, pitfalls to look out for, etc., etc. would be most appreciated. Thanks!

 

[TheNerdyBee]

I’ve done a few perrys and really love them, so here are my 2 cents.

I’m a big fan of fruit in both the primary and the secondary, and since you’re using that might fruit, I kind of doubt that you’ll need the acid blend. I would definitely use pectic enzyme anytime you’re planning to use whole fruit. Is this a gallon batch?

Both of the yeasts you mentioned should work, but I would add your vanilla and spices to the secondary to avoid having their flavor blown out by the fermentation.

As far as the timing goes, I’ve let mine go for about a month in the primary, then onto lots of fruit in the secondary until it was completely cleared, then into the bottle for further aging. A second racking doesn’t sound like a bad idea. I’ve had a hell of a time with fruit clogging things up when bottling, so if I were a more patient person, I’d probably go that route too

Hope this was helpful!

 

[growlrr]

Thank you for the advice - Yes, I'm doing a one gallon batch to start. I'm guessing just a little bit of enzyme will go a long way? (it's only a.6 pounds of fruit). Maybe 1/8 tsp.?

 

[TopherM]

I'm making my own syrups instead of adding fruit to fermentation.

I basically puree the fruit and boil that puree with light corn syrup and reduce it down just a bit. I then cool and put that fruit syrup in mason jars in the fridge for about a week.

I add this syrup to my ciders, meads and beers (mostly berliners). Over the last 2 years, I've won 4 fruit beer medals and just won a mead gold medal (scored a 46) for a pear melomel using this method.

For competition entries, I pasteurize bottles to kill the yeast and keep the fruit sweetness.

It's a great alternative to actually fermenting fruit, as you can then add these syrups to taste and know exactly what the concentrations will be. I also sometimes pair these with pepper tinctures.

Good luck!

 

[bernardsmith]

Hi growlrr - and welcome. Did you write that you are adding .6 of a pound or 6 pounds of pears? You might get about 1/2 gallon of juice from 6 lbs of pears. Do you have a press to express the juice?

 

[landsknechte]

I'd suggest pureeing the pears, I find it makes life easier. Pectic enzyme is a good idea if you want crystal clear results. You might want to add yeast nutrient to be on the safe side for complete fermentation but you don't have to.

I am not a huge fan of Champagne yeasts, but they'd work in a pinch. My issue is that they seem to strip a lot of delicate flavours. I'd probably opt for D-47 but that's just me. I haven't worked with the D-47 but the Champagne stuff has seemed to make rocket fuel for me which would have taken a number have months to settle out.

If your plan is to make it very strong, the D-47 is probably not the best idea. I'm talking probably above 12% or so. Apparently the Lalvin is good for meads, though.

 

[growlrr]

I'm using 1.5 pounds for the primary and another 1.5 pounds when I rack off into the secondary. I think that will be enough?

 

[growlrr]

I ended up going the puree route with the pectic enzyme. Froze them, boiled them and mashed the hell out of them. Wasn't as bad as I thought, although it was only three large pears! It would never work for a large batch - Your arm would fall off. Threw in a crushed campden tab and the honey and now it sits until tonight when I'll pitch the yeast. Should I measure the S.G. before I add the yeast? I have to admit, the whole S.G. things seems to me to be the most "black magic" part of this, even though it is probably the most scientific. I konw what S.G. is, but I'm not entirely sure what I am looking for or what is "good" or "bad"

 

[bernardsmith]

Nothing magical about "specific gravity" and nothing "good" or bad". All you are doing is measuring how dense your liquid is when compared to the density of pure water. The assumption is that any difference in the density is due to material dissolved in the liquid and that "material" is ... for all intents and purposes...sugars . If you know how much "sugar" is in your liquid and you assume (for all intents and purposes) that all the sugar is perfectly fermentable (that's generally true with fruits and honey but not true for beer) and if we know how much alcohol can be made from a known quantity of fermentable sugar then by measuring how dense (the specific gravity) your liquid is you can determine how much sugar is dissolved in the liquid and so how much alcohol that liquid can potentially produce. If the density was shown to be equivalent to a specific gravity of 1.080 then we know that there is about 2 lbs of sugar dissolved in about 1 US gallon of the liquid and we therefore know that potentially - all other things being equal - those 2 lbs per gallon can make a wine which will be about 10.5% alcohol by volume (ABV). Nothing "good" or "bad" about that. It is "good" is that is what you want. It is "bad" if you were planning on making a wine that had half that amount of alcohol .. or twice that amount. Most wine makers tend to aim for wines that finish at about 12% ABV so they will tend to have a starting gravity of about 1.090. But ciders will tend to be around 6% (apples naturally have about 1lb of sugar when you press out about 1 gallon of juice)
The idea in wine making is to balance the amount of the alcohol with the richness and complexity of the flavors, the tartness of the fruit and the residual sweetness. Wine making is always a balancing act. If your wine is nicely balanced then it is fine. If it is not - if it is out of balance - If it is too sweet (or not sweet enough) , insufficiently tart (or too acidic), too alcoholic (or not alcoholic enough), if it is flavor thin (or if the wrong flavors are too prominent) - if it does not have a rich "mouth feel" (if it does not linger in your mouth as it coats your tongue and palate but slips down like water ) then the balance you were looking for is not there. And that is an important point: if YOU know what you are aiming for then you know when you have scored a bulls-eye. If you don't know what it is that you are aiming for then it is a challenge to know what you need to do to hit that target.

 

[fossilcat]

You bring up a good point.

A hydrometer measures the relative density of a liquid solution, calibrated to 1.000 for pure water. Sugar adds density to water so adding honey creates more boyancy for your hydrometer. As sugar ferments to alcohol and CO2, the density of your solution decreases - the difference between your OG and FG (there's a conversion calculation for this of course) is your alcohol percentage.

I don't know what to make of the puree, though. I don't know if the puree, desolved in the must, creates a sort of colloidal solution that would cause a boyancy separate from that created by the sugar, lending to a false hydrometer reading. Maybe someone else can answer that. Maybe I'm over thinking it.

 

[growlrr]

Thank you so much. This is very helpful. I'm sorry for all the questions, but how often do you check S.G.? My first attempt (a pretty straight forward honey mead with some cinnamon and clove added in the primary) had been happily bubbling away in a carboy for a couple of weeks now after I racked it into a carboy. Is removing the airlock to check on it's progress the kiss of death? Also, maybe a silly question, but when I get ready to bottle this (months from now, I know), how are you absolutely sure the fermentation has stopped so I don't build lots of little glass bombs in my basement? Thanks again - I am really enjoying the learning process...

 

[bernardsmith]

There is never a need to apologize for asking a question. It is always the questions that don't get asked that cause problems - and even more often (IMO) it is the answers that we give that we should apologize for...

Mead and wine ain't beer. Beer is always very susceptible to spoilage for a whole host of reasons that simply do not apply to fruit or honey so brewers are almost neurotic about preventing their beer from coming into contact with air. Wine makers (and I include mead makers here) are far more laid back about spoilage in general and oxidation in particular. In the same way that your car can rust (rust is oxidation of iron) if left unpainted and exposed to the elements so too can wine BUT a few drops of rain on a scratch made this morning won't turn your car into a rust bucket. Same with wine when exposed to air. It takes a significant amount of time and a significant amount of exposure. Simply pulling enough wine into a sanitized tube and measuring the gravity with a sanitized hydrometer will not have any detrimental impact on your wine AND unlike brewers you can feel perfectly OK about returning that sample to the fermenter.
How often to measure? Depends. Watching the airlock for bubbles is not a good method but you might take a sample after a week and depending on the reading you get after another three or four days. Generally speaking you might find that given the ambient temperature of your wine room, the yeast you use, the starting gravity, how much nutrient you add, how much you aerate the wine as it actively ferments that your fermentations last 10 days, two weeks, perhaps 7 days... I try to rack to a secondary when the gravity drops to about 1.005 but others on this forum rack a little sooner (around 1.010).
How do you know when your fermentation has finally stopped? You take three readings over a few days ( say, over the course of a week) and you check to see if there has been absolutely no change in the gravity. Now, wine and mead should (all other things being equal) drop to gravities below 1.000. (alcohol being less dense than water) and when the gravity is stable at 1.000 or lower you know there is - for all intents and purposes - no sugar remaining. If there is no sugar remaining then the yeast cannot produce more CO2 and if they cannot produce more CO2 then if you degas (remove the CO2 dissolved in the wine ) there is no good reason why any pressure should result in bottle bombs . But that said, you might still find there is enough pressure build up due to a process called nucleation where the remaining CO2 which had been absorbed in the liquid bubbles up and forces the cork to pop. To prevent that you may want to either allow your wine to age for long enough that almost all the CO2 will be expelled before you bottle or you may want to spend more time and energy degassing mechanically (pulling a vacuum, stirring, adding nucleation points etc).
Wine that is at 1.000 is dry. You may prefer it sweeter. You can stabilize the wine using K-meta and K-sorbate and then add sugar. When you have stabilized the wine the remaining yeast are unable to ferment any added sugar but stabilization really can only be done when the yeast colony is shutting down at the end of fermentation. To try to stabilize the wine while the yeast are very active is like trying to catch a bullet between your teeth.. Magicians can make you think that they can do it but if you watch carefully they don't.

 

[growlrr]

Sooooo...here is an update - I pitched the must on 3/15. Its a one gallon batch - 3# clover honey, 3/4 tsp of pectic enzyme, one campden tab, 1/2 tsp acid blend and 1.5# of pears I had crushed into a pulp. Added 1/2 tsp of nutrient when I pitched it and another 1/2 tsp 48 hours later. The yeast I used was Red Star Premier Blanc (1 packet rehydrated). SG right before I pitched the yeast was 1.085. The airlock has been very quiet for the past 24 hours and curiosity got the best of me so I took another hydrometer reading. The pears have simply evaporated and the SG is 0.992! I know now why they airlock is quiet. Did I somehow "overproof" or over ferment this? I am planning on racking it off into a carboy and onto another 1.5# of pears but I've not seen a lot of threads mentioning 6 days from pitch to finishing the primary. Did I mess this up? Help!?!?!?!?