session vikings blood attempt

[fluketamer]

never a simple post
ive only made two meads and niether came out great. ive always wondered how all the mead makers out there make great meads. after reading bomm post it looked too confusing to open the FV add stepped nutrients rack etc. when i make beer i do closed transfer and once the FV is closed it dont get opened until cleaning.
so i left it to the mead makers. then over the summer i tried two really good session meads at an outdoor festival. i got to talk to the mead maker for a while and learned that with proper feremntation temps and SNA anyone can make great mead just like anyone can make great beer if you follow a good recipe and use good technique. ( i like to think i can do both😉)

dabbling in ciders lately a poster led me over to a youtube thread where they also make a ton of mead. vikings blood cherry melomel caught my eye. i have access to a variety of bottle fruit juices that are made sorbate free with 100 percent fruit juice. one of those is triple cherry. i never tried it cause of the tart cherry in there, but it looked perfect for a vikings blood mead. then i found a hibiscus, rosehip,cherry tea and thought i have to make this.

2 gallon batch

4 tea bags in 2 cups of water steeped for 20 mins. (this smelled amazing with a huge cherry aroma)
2 cups of triple cherry juice (dark, white and tart cherries)
1/4 teaspoon of yeast nutrient
juice of half a lemon
2.2 lbs of wildflower honey (tastes great not too sweet .)
came to sg of 1.047


the must tasted decent a little thin but with equal cherry honey flavor mix.
i dumped this onto a fresh cider yeast cake that made a great cherry apple cider (percfect mix i thought)

the yeast exploded and had a great 1 inch kreusen froming wihtin 3 hours. the gravity dropped 20 points in first 24 hours then it slowed drastically.

at 24 hours i added 1/4 teaspoon yeast nutrient and it seems to have started again. its now at about 1019 .

any chance this will be good or did i make weak prison hooch .
i was planning to add anohter 1/4 teaspoon at 48 and 72 hours. should i add the nutrients regardless of the gravity readings and just keep on schedule or if the yeast is doing fine can i just stop adding ?

im nervous as its my first real mead attempt.

i want it to get down to around 1 and back sweeten with honey/ cherry juice mix.


thanks for any replies

 

[MightyMosin]

Use something like this to determine your nutrient requirements
https://www.meadmaderight.com/tosna-calculator

When doing a session, give it all the nutrients at once and don't try to stagger them as fermentation goes so fast.

Most sessions are carbonated as that helps the flabby body of the drink.

 

[Graham H]

Good luck! I made my first mead about a year and a half ago and it didn’t turn out so good. I suspect this was due to fermentation temps being too high, and the advice you received seems to pint in that direction.

I decided to try my hand again last November with a holiday mead (candy cane). I fermented in a cold garage until the SG stabilized. It’s sitting in bulk conditioning now. I’ll bottle it in a few months and let it rest until December.

Your recipe looks great—hope it turns out! If you find a mead that tastes good but is a little too strong for a session, you could always cut it (per serving) with sparkling water as in a Schorle.

 

[DBhomebrew]

When making a session with TOSNA (and other protocols using rehydration nutrients) be particularly careful with pitch rate as it ties into nutrient rate as well.

TOSNA does not factor in the YAN of the rehydration nutrients such as Go-Ferm. Say TOSNA calls for 1g of yeast in your gallon batch. You're a beer brewer who rightly believes you can't overpitch. You use half the 11g packet. The overpitch isn't the problem, it's what comes next. You look at the Go-Ferm instructions and measure out your 1.3g/g and properly rehydrate your 5.5g of yeast with 7g of Go-Ferm.

TOSNA wasn't factoring in the first 1.3g, not a huge deal especially with a full strength mead. Now you've pitched 7g of nutrients on top of what TOSNA was calculating for YAN. In a session mead, you're probably going to taste that. I can tell you, is not delicious.

Look into TANG for graphs and more science-y info. Basically TOSNA with awareness of Go-Ferm.

 

[fluketamer]

im almost positive the nutrient helped as the little blips in the line got much more infrequent after adding second nutirent dose. and now i am down to 1.010.

4.8 ish abv im very happy with anything above this so i am not going to add any more nutirents

i have a feeling this is going to dry out to 1.000.
btw this was m10 ale yeast cake from an expired pack of dry yeast at least a year past bb date.
oddly enough this threw zero sulfur. when i first fermented the cider on this cake it blew sulfur for about 3 days
it smells promising.

 

[fluketamer]

i just sampled this at 1.002 and 5.9 percent and its really really good. better than the cider that i made on the cake before this mead. better than the mead i was attempting to clone. the cherry really comes through its very crisp and clean . the floral honey also shows up the hibiscus adds a nice spice or maybe its the rose hips. next time i will add another tea bag and try a different honey. i got a case of bottles to bottle it in.
can you age session mead like you age a strong mead ?