recommend a Software for mead making ?

[ReDim]

Being a beer lover and coming into mead from beer brewing, I am aware of beer brew software. But it's not the same for mead. What software are you using ?

Thanks

 

[bernardsmith]

Is there any need for software when making mead other than your head and mouth? Honey is 100 percent fermentable and about 1 lb of honey dissolved in water to make a gallon (US) will have an SG of about 1.040 or thereabouts or about 5% ABV... You add fruit and extracted juice will have about the same SG. Added spices and herbs don't add alcohol.
Honey is notorious for its lack of nutrients suitable for yeast so you want to add nutrients and typically mead makers add those in stages to provide the yeast with needed nitrogen and vitamin B.
Any wine or beer yeast can ferment honey so the issues are
1. How low or high maintenance are you prepared for the yeast
2. What flavors and aromas are you wanting to enhance or inhibit
3. How strong is the concentration of honey to water
4. How much alcohol to residual sugar are you looking for
5. What is the final ABV you prefer given the flavor profile and the acidity of the mead you are making
6. Temperature is also a consideration and some yeasts work better at lower temps while others prefer higher. In my opinion, you want to ferment at lower temperatures to preserve the more volatile aromatics and flavor molecules..

Different from brewing, you want to incorporate oxygen and remove CO2 during active fermentation so you stir deeply and vigorously twice daily. Mead is likely to be weak on acidity so you may want to add acid close to bottling time. Oaking adds to complexity and tannins may be desirable... but computerized software would seem to be irrelevant as you are working with a product - honey that varies from season to season, hive to hive, and flower to flower.
There are no "styles" that govern mead makers in the way that beer "styles" govern brewers. You have low alcohol , high alcohol, sweet and dry sparkling and still with ranges between those poles. You can add hops or elderflowers or spices and herbs and that would be a metheglin or you can add fruit from cherries to oranges, from mangoes to dates and that would be a melomel. You can add barley and that would be a bracket (or braggot) or grapes and that would be a pyment. You can dilute the honey 1:1 with water or 1:2 or 1:3 or 1:4 or any other combination of honey to water (or honey to liquid - say apple juice) . Not sure what software would provide... because as I say, you are not trying to match a style.. You are simply trying to make a flavorful, rich tasting and aromatic honey wine.
Of course others may disagree and suggest software...

 

[bob1852]

Here's a good, yet complex, mead calculator...

http://gotmead.com/blog/the-mead-calculator.html

 

[SerifSansSerif]

Is there any need for software when making mead other than your head and mouth? Honey is 100 percent fermentable and about 1 lb of honey dissolved in water to make a gallon (US) will have an SG of about 1.040 or thereabouts or about 5% ABV... You add fruit and extracted juice will have about the same SG. Added spices and herbs don't add alcohol.
Honey is notorious for its lack of nutrients suitable for yeast so you want to add nutrients and typically mead makers add those in stages to provide the yeast with needed nitrogen and vitamin B.
Any wine or beer yeast can ferment honey so the issues are
1. How low or high maintenance are you prepared for the yeast
2. What flavors and aromas are you wanting to enhance or inhibit
3. How strong is the concentration of honey to water
4. How much alcohol to residual sugar are you looking for
5. What is the final ABV you prefer given the flavor profile and the acidity of the mead you are making
6. Temperature is also a consideration and some yeasts work better at lower temps while others prefer higher. In my opinion, you want to ferment at lower temperatures to preserve the more volatile aromatics and flavor molecules..

Different from brewing, you want to incorporate oxygen and remove CO2 during active fermentation so you stir deeply and vigorously twice daily. Mead is likely to be weak on acidity so you may want to add acid close to bottling time. Oaking adds to complexity and tannins may be desirable... but computerized software would seem to be irrelevant as you are working with a product - honey that varies from season to season, hive to hive, and flower to flower.
There are no "styles" that govern mead makers in the way that beer "styles" govern brewers. You have low alcohol , high alcohol, sweet and dry sparkling and still with ranges between those poles. You can add hops or elderflowers or spices and herbs and that would be a metheglin or you can add fruit from cherries to oranges, from mangoes to dates and that would be a melomel. You can add barley and that would be a bracket (or braggot) or grapes and that would be a pyment. You can dilute the honey 1:1 with water or 1:2 or 1:3 or 1:4 or any other combination of honey to water (or honey to liquid - say apple juice) . Not sure what software would provide... because as I say, you are not trying to match a style.. You are simply trying to make a flavorful, rich tasting and aromatic honey wine.
Of course others may disagree and suggest software...

Though I completely agree, it's a ***** and a half to try and figure out ratios and amounts in your head when trying to guess what your final projected ABV should be. Especially if you do do it in your head, and you step feed, or are doing something more like a melomel.

 

[bernardsmith]

Though I completely agree, it's a ***** and a half to try and figure out ratios and amounts in your head when trying to guess what your final projected ABV should be. Especially if you do do it in your head, and you step feed, or are doing something more like a melomel.

I agree but that is the job of a calculator not anything more sophisticated. Something like Beersmith treats every batch of the same grain like every other batch and every kind of hop as the same from one season to the next.. works for beer but I don't know that that works for wine making... apples picked this season in NY will have a very different sugar to water content than the apples picked next year. The intensity of flavor of honey made from "wildflowers" in the spring is different from the flavor made in the fall and honey made locally in the spring will be different from honey made in a different part of the state made at the same time... Moreover, unlike beer, yeast attenuation with sugars from honey is as close to 100 percent as possible... so there is no issue of "efficiency" and no real issue of whether we have produced too much or too little unfermentable sugar.. In my opinion brewing is akin to engineering but wine making (and I include mead making) is more like gardening - The engineer's hand shapes the product. It is not organic. It is manufactured The gardener removes problems and adds enhancers to allow the seed to grow. The gardener's product is organic and so far more attuned to the natural world..It's like raising a child not like building a bridge.

 

[fuelish]

I typically use pen and paper and my head, occasionally using the mead calc if I add additional fermentables after OG has been established ....not perfect, but, what is??? It's close enough for home use...

 

[SerifSansSerif]

I agree but that is the job of a calculator not anything more sophisticated. Something like Beersmith treats every batch of the same grain like every other batch and every kind of hop as the same from one season to the next.. works for beer but I don't know that that works for wine making... apples picked this season in NY will have a very different sugar to water content than the apples picked next year. The intensity of flavor of honey made from "wildflowers" in the spring is different from the flavor made in the fall and honey made locally in the spring will be different from honey made in a different part of the state made at the same time... Moreover, unlike beer, yeast attenuation with sugars from honey is as close to 100 percent as possible... so there is no issue of "efficiency" and no real issue of whether we have produced too much or too little unfermentable sugar.. In my opinion brewing is akin to engineering but wine making (and I include mead making) is more like gardening - The engineer's hand shapes the product. It is not organic. It is manufactured The gardener removes problems and adds enhancers to allow the seed to grow. The gardener's product is organic and so far more attuned to the natural world..It's like raising a child not like building a bridge.

Again, very few arguments, except to say that a lot of that depends on the brewer. There's a lot of engineer type brewers, (wine or beer).

Personally I enjoy the freedom and the similarities in brewing (my experience is more on the wine/cider/mead side) to gardening. I also find it to be great blank canvas upon which to experiment and express myself through. Sometimes that gets the best of me, though, and to be honest, more often than not I don't take notes. Hence going to the calculators to guesstimate my ABV.

Of all the flavors of a brew, the hotness and prevalence of alcohol can be deceptive, especially in a particullarly young brew. (hotness can dominate initially, even with relatively low ABV's, although, the reverse is true of aged drinks, where a higher ABV can be masked by bolder flavors).

 

[ReDim]

Is there any need for software when making mead other than your head and mouth? Honey is 100 percent fermentable and about 1 lb of honey dissolved in water to make a gallon (US) will have an SG of about 1.040 or thereabouts or about 5% ABV... You add fruit and extracted juice will have about the same SG. Added spices and herbs don't add alcohol.
Honey is notorious for its lack of nutrients suitable for yeast so you want to add nutrients and typically mead makers add those in stages to provide the yeast with needed nitrogen and vitamin B.
Any wine or beer yeast can ferment honey so the issues are
1. How low or high maintenance are you prepared for the yeast
2. What flavors and aromas are you wanting to enhance or inhibit
3. How strong is the concentration of honey to water
4. How much alcohol to residual sugar are you looking for
5. What is the final ABV you prefer given the flavor profile and the acidity of the mead you are making
6. Temperature is also a consideration and some yeasts work better at lower temps while others prefer higher. In my opinion, you want to ferment at lower temperatures to preserve the more volatile aromatics and flavor molecules..

Different from brewing, you want to incorporate oxygen and remove CO2 during active fermentation so you stir deeply and vigorously twice daily. Mead is likely to be weak on acidity so you may want to add acid close to bottling time. Oaking adds to complexity and tannins may be desirable... but computerized software would seem to be irrelevant as you are working with a product - honey that varies from season to season, hive to hive, and flower to flower.
There are no "styles" that govern mead makers in the way that beer "styles" govern brewers. You have low alcohol , high alcohol, sweet and dry sparkling and still with ranges between those poles. You can add hops or elderflowers or spices and herbs and that would be a metheglin or you can add fruit from cherries to oranges, from mangoes to dates and that would be a melomel. You can add barley and that would be a bracket (or braggot) or grapes and that would be a pyment. You can dilute the honey 1:1 with water or 1:2 or 1:3 or 1:4 or any other combination of honey to water (or honey to liquid - say apple juice) . Not sure what software would provide... because as I say, you are not trying to match a style.. You are simply trying to make a flavorful, rich tasting and aromatic honey wine.
Of course others may disagree and suggest software...

Your saying that i should make these calculations in excel. Fruit is another story. Juice consecrates and raw fruit...

 

[ReDim]

I am afraid I do not understand the analogy of engineering v gardening. Once the concept of brewing chemistry is understood, I would imagine people are trying to match some idea or other.

Right now it's Pomegranate season, they sell em here for like $1.20 each. 18% alcohol tolerance yeast 12.5 lbs of honey, pomegranate juice instead of water... It's dry and bitter.... The intended audience wants something sweeter.. I also need nutritional info.... But I think that 15 lbs of honey And X number of pounds of pomegranate seed to the secondary might work

 

[SerifSansSerif]

I am afraid I do not understand the analogy of engineering v gardening. Once the concept of brewing chemistry is understood, I would imagine people are trying to match some idea or other.

Right now it's Pomegranate season, they sell em here for like $1.20 each. 18% alcohol tolerance yeast 12.5 lbs of honey, pomegranate juice instead of water... It's dry and bitter.... The intended audience wants something sweeter.. I also need nutritional info.... But I think that 15 lbs of honey And X number of pounds of pomegranate seed to the secondary might work

And thus you reveal that you lie on the engineering side of the divide.

There's nothing wrong with that.

But it's not how I brew. I toss in ingredients as I go, or I might make adjustments on the fly, and more than trust the science, I trust my instincts and experiences. I'm not saying I brew devoid of science, but that it's of far less importance.

The other thing about brewing and gardening, which is the grander part of what I think you're missing, is that it isn't a simply process of mixing solution A with solution B and Presto! Alcohol!

Instead you are dealing with ingredients that have tremendous variation from year to year, and sometimes even month to month. The ingredients are living breathing things. (unless you stick purely with extract brewing your beers, and buying bottled juices for your wines, and and although it may not be alive, processed honey for your meads).

Then on top of the incredible amounts of variation within your ingredients, you're pitching a living culture into your mix and basically in charge of nurturing several billions and billlions of yeast cells through thousands of generations (while also culling away the dead from their enclosed glass bubble universe), of which you control everything: light, air, heat....

Then you start to realize that brewing is a lot like chaos upon chaos layered in a bottle, and you're just along for the ride, minimizing problems and trying to get relatively reproducible results.

And much like the ingredients you are fermenting, as a gardener I can attest to the fact that even with damned near identical seeds and starting material, no two plants are EXACTLY the same... Neither are two beers.

EDIT: as for your pomegranates, I never had much luck with a pomegranate wine, but grenadine syrup was originally (and may still be), a pomegranate syrup. It might be worth researching for inspiration towards your brew.

 

[bernardsmith]

I don't think that you NEED any program to make a fine mead or wine. If 1 lb of sugar in water to make a gallon will provide a gravity of 40 points (1.040) and if 40 points of sugar when fermented out results in about 5 % ABV (.040 * 131 = 5.25), then you 2 lbs of fermentables -> 10% and 3 lbs -> 15%. Most wines, given the flavor richness (or poverty), the acidity, the tannic levels best balance out at about 12% ABV so you really don't want to ferment to dry a starting gravity of about 1.090 - but that is matter of preference IMO. With wine you can always back-sweeten or , as some mead makers do, deliberately feed the mead step by step with more honey until the yeast die of alcohol poisoning (something brewers rarely if ever experience.. (the yeast manufacturers provide spec sheets that indicate the typical tolerance for alcohol of their yeast - but tolerances are tolerances and are not accurate to two decimal places... so a yeast that has an advertised tolerance for 18% ABV might crash at 20%... BUT wine ain't spirits and a wine is not meant to power a rocket).
Bottom line, if you aim for a starting gravity of between 1.090 and 1.110 - and you use "enough" fruit in your must to produce the kind of flavor that you like (you don't dilute anything with water simply in order to provide the volume you want!) and you taste the wine as it develops and ages - with a view to determining whether this or that batch needs more acidity and or more tannin (the mouth drying quality that grape skins or persimmons or chestnuts offer) then excel sheets seem to me to be unnecessary. What you DO want is to keep copious notes - but for that all you need is pen and paper or Word.

We don't grow pomegranates up here but I occasionally make pomegranate wine from commercially available pomegranate juice. Again, I boost the sugar content so that the starting gravity is 1.090... One technique that you may consider if pomegranates are relatively plentiful and inexpensive in your neck of the wood is NOT to add sugar to boost the sugar content but to freeze the pressed juice and to collect the the first 1/3 of the juice that you thaw. This first third will contain about 1/2 of all the sugar... so if pomegranate juice has a gravity of close to 1.050 then this thawed concentrate will have a gravity of about 1.100 and will have a far more intense pomegranate flavor... Again... a program won't make that suggestion...
I just saw that you are in NYC... my suggestion would be to use something like Pom rather than pomegranates. Ripe pomegranates are not typically sold in the supermarkets we have here Upstate because folk here have no idea that a ripe pomegranate looks brown and its skin looks dry. Folk love the bright shiny red skinned fruit - assuming that they ought to look like ripe apples... But those are in fact as ripe as green bananas..

 

[ReDim]

I am drinking a very addictive honey fermentation right now. Hard to stop..\



It was aged for 2 years, I need a record of what and how, so i can learn and improve....

This mead is so good that I am about to become a Viking ! Especially when that annoying woman is not here... What's up with annoying women, when we were 15 and they looked hot enouph that I was willing to put up with their B.S....

yahh anyways. First time around I brewed 2 batches and waited from 2 years to drink em... Now I am going to be brewing for the winter... 4 Brews before Feb begins.... Will need a record keeping thingy... Since i am software guy, I guess will have to build it..


looks like I will have to start with excel template...

I think even honey will have different fermentable sugar content... The honey that I use will have more fermentable sugars then raw honey... The calculator i used said that Honey is fermentable to 78% but somewhere else online it was 95%. hmm.. If at least 5% of honey is not fermentable, now I have to figure out those 300 ml of unfermentables to OG ratio.... What is the lowest OG I can get in 3.5gl of spring water with those 300 ml and what will be that with 4.5 ish gallons when I top it off...

woman said she wanted pomegranate next ! I found 16Oz of organic pomegranate concentrate. To the amount of liquid, that is about 1/2 of what is needed to make POM juice. Alcohol tolerance is Champagne 18%

 

[DV8DUG]

Is there any need for software when making mead other than your head and mouth? Honey is 100 percent fermentable and about 1 lb of honey dissolved in water to make a gallon (US) will have an SG of about 1.040 or thereabouts or about 5% ABV... You add fruit and extracted juice will have about the same SG. Added spices and herbs don't add alcohol.
Honey is notorious for its lack of nutrients suitable for yeast so you want to add nutrients and typically mead makers add those in stages to provide the yeast with needed nitrogen and vitamin B.
Any wine or beer yeast can ferment honey so the issues are
1. How low or high maintenance are you prepared for the yeast
2. What flavors and aromas are you wanting to enhance or inhibit
3. How strong is the concentration of honey to water
4. How much alcohol to residual sugar are you looking for
5. What is the final ABV you prefer given the flavor profile and the acidity of the mead you are making
6. Temperature is also a consideration and some yeasts work better at lower temps while others prefer higher. In my opinion, you want to ferment at lower temperatures to preserve the more volatile aromatics and flavor molecules..

Different from brewing, you want to incorporate oxygen and remove CO2 during active fermentation so you stir deeply and vigorously twice daily. Mead is likely to be weak on acidity so you may want to add acid close to bottling time. Oaking adds to complexity and tannins may be desirable... but computerized software would seem to be irrelevant as you are working with a product - honey that varies from season to season, hive to hive, and flower to flower.
There are no "styles" that govern mead makers in the way that beer "styles" govern brewers. You have low alcohol , high alcohol, sweet and dry sparkling and still with ranges between those poles. You can add hops or elderflowers or spices and herbs and that would be a metheglin or you can add fruit from cherries to oranges, from mangoes to dates and that would be a melomel. You can add barley and that would be a bracket (or braggot) or grapes and that would be a pyment. You can dilute the honey 1:1 with water or 1:2 or 1:3 or 1:4 or any other combination of honey to water (or honey to liquid - say apple juice) . Not sure what software would provide... because as I say, you are not trying to match a style.. You are simply trying to make a flavorful, rich tasting and aromatic honey wine.
Of course others may disagree and suggest software...

I disagree with you on styles. Look HERE
Also... pure sugar renders a SG of 1.040. Honey is typically 1.037.
Adding extracted juice will indeed raise the SG while fruit does as well, it isn't read readily by a hydrometer. That's where software comes in.
I have a beta almost ready to be tested if you are interested. I have broken down the brix levels to density of the particular fruit and have a slim margin for error on predicting the finishing gravity as well as ABV.
Other features include a recipe book where you can split batches and track events via an event log, exporting recipe to .pdf, adjusted SG for ANY calibration of hydrometer, predicted finishing sweetness, staggered honey additions and that special heightened ABV trick, and even the honey varietal is taken into consideration. Lemme know if you are interested in being a tester!

 

[hocktim]

I agree but that is the job of a calculator not anything more sophisticated. Something like Beersmith treats every batch of the same grain like every other batch and every kind of hop as the same from one season to the next.. works for beer but I don't know that that works for wine making... apples picked this season in NY will have a very different sugar to water content than the apples picked next year. The intensity of flavor of honey made from "wildflowers" in the spring is different from the flavor made in the fall and honey made locally in the spring will be different from honey made in a different part of the state made at the same time... Moreover, unlike beer, yeast attenuation with sugars from honey is as close to 100 percent as possible... so there is no issue of "efficiency" and no real issue of whether we have produced too much or too little unfermentable sugar.. In my opinion brewing is akin to engineering but wine making (and I include mead making) is more like gardening - The engineer's hand shapes the product. It is not organic. It is manufactured The gardener removes problems and adds enhancers to allow the seed to grow. The gardener's product is organic and so far more attuned to the natural world..It's like raising a child not like building a bridge.

 

[hocktim]

I almost never reply, but I think you are not looking at the bigger picture. lets say a brewer is wanting to also keep digital records of his recipes and such, your head is not going to remember all that 18 months later and your scratch paper that you wrote it out on is going to be lost 17.9 months ago.

 

[bernardsmith]

I almost never reply, but I think you are not looking at the bigger picture. lets say a brewer is wanting to also keep digital records of his recipes and such, your head is not going to remember all that 18 months later and your scratch paper that you wrote it out on is going to be lost 17.9 months ago.

But that is why you keep a journal of your wine making and not scraps of paper. Your journal can be online or on paper but why does keeping a record mean that you need to use someone else's software, and software that was designed for brewing and not wine or mead making. My records go back 15 years or more...How small is that picture?

 

[lump42]

And thus you reveal that you lie on the engineering side of the divide.

There's nothing wrong with that.

But it's not how I brew. I toss in ingredients as I go, or I might make adjustments on the fly, and more than trust the science, I trust my instincts and experiences. I'm not saying I brew devoid of science, but that it's of far less importance.

The other thing about brewing and gardening, which is the grander part of what I think you're missing, is that it isn't a simply process of mixing solution A with solution B and Presto! Alcohol!

Instead you are dealing with ingredients that have tremendous variation from year to year, and sometimes even month to month. The ingredients are living breathing things. (unless you stick purely with extract brewing your beers, and buying bottled juices for your wines, and and although it may not be alive, processed honey for your meads).

Then on top of the incredible amounts of variation within your ingredients, you're pitching a living culture into your mix and basically in charge of nurturing several billions and billlions of yeast cells through thousands of generations (while also culling away the dead from their enclosed glass bubble universe), of which you control everything: light, air, heat....

Then you start to realize that brewing is a lot like chaos upon chaos layered in a bottle, and you're just along for the ride, minimizing problems and trying to get relatively reproducible results.

And much like the ingredients you are fermenting, as a gardener I can attest to the fact that even with damned near identical seeds and starting material, no two plants are EXACTLY the same... Neither are two beers.

EDIT: as for your pomegranates, I never had much luck with a pomegranate wine, but grenadine syrup was originally (and may still be), a pomegranate syrup. It might be worth researching for inspiration towards your brew.

I think you're setting up a false assumption on gardening. It doesn't have to be throwing things in the ground. A lot of science can be added into gardening, so that from year to year, and plant to plant, they are producing on par to each other. Gardening can get just a nerdy as brewing.

 

[Seamonkey84]

Tell me about it, I’ve been diving into how to grow and manage blackberries and raspberries, lots of different varieties and each have different methods to prune/manage the growth. Then the different types of blueberries that should be planted next to each other for cross pollination and harvest through the summer at different times. If you can’t tell, I’m basing gardening ideas around what I like to make wine/mead with.

 

[Maylar]

A spiral notebook works for me. Then copied into a Word doc on the 'puter. I have >10 years worth of data and tasting notes.

That said, there is a mead spreadsheet that I picked up somewhere, but have never used it. Unfortunately the forum won't accept an .xls file type for uploads.

It's called mead 2017.xls if you can find it.

 

[lump42]

A spiral notebook works for me. Then copied into a Word doc on the 'puter. I have >10 years worth of data and tasting notes.

That said, there is a mead spreadsheet that I picked up somewhere, but have never used it. Unfortunately the forum won't accept an .xls file type for uploads.

It's called mead 2017.xls if you can find it.

I've been using Brewer's Friend to log mead and wine batches as well. I don't use it for mead recipe formulations, but just the brew log with gravity, volumes, and notes.