Sweet and Sparkly Melomel - advice needed

[Tadeusz Leliwa]

Dear all, I want to make a sweetish melomel that is sparkly and not too strong (i.e. not 18%). I obviously cannot really on any backsweetening here. Now there seems to be a couple ways to go about this. One is to add less honey to the mix, use yeast with high alcohol tolerance, bottle it of 0.005-0.01 gravity points before the yeast eat up all the sugar and add some lactose for sweetness. Or I can use a lower alcohol tolerant strain such as Safale US-05 or Lalviin 71B, add all the honey and just bottle it when the gravity point drop will indicate approaching the abv tolerance of the yeast, so that the last bits ferment of in the bottle.
Does anyone have any experience with this? Any comments on yeast stress in both scenarios? Any other advice or strategies? I am fairly new to this game, so any words of wisdom are appreciated.
Thanks a lot!

 

[Seamonkey84]

Other than kegging, the Only way to “safely” achieve this is to pasteurize your bottles when desired carbonation level has been achieved. Check out the cider forum for the directions for that.

 

[bernardsmith]

Hi Tadeusz, and welcome. Making a sweet and sparkling mead (or wine) is always a challenge. For the wine to be sparkling it needs to be bottled while there is still a very small amount of unfermented but fermentable sugar and for the wine to be sweet the yeast cannot be eating remaining sugar. So yes, you can add a non fermentable sugar but the yeast must still have some sugar left to convert to CO2 to make the sparkle. The simplest method is to prime the mead with CO2 (kegging, as many brewers do with their beer) but you can also use lactose to back sweeten. Others may disagree but in my opinion it is never very wise to assume that your yeast will be unable to eat all the sugar you provide. True, they may quite today, but after a year or two you may find that daughter cells in the mead or wine have been born with tolerances that far exceed the tolerances you assumed the yeast had when you first pitched them and the result is bottle bombs exploding wherever you store your wines. Always best to back sweeten , and in this case , back sweeten with a non fermentable sugar such as lactose.

 

[Tadeusz Leliwa]

Other than kegging, the Only way to “safely” achieve this is to pasteurize your bottles when desired carbonation level has been achieved. Check out the cider forum for the directions for that.

Thanks for this! I'll check this out, but this brings me to a related honey question. If I pasteurise this means that I will need to heat up the product. I usually try to dissolve my honey in cold water and then 'sterilise' chemically to retain some of the properties of the honey. Heating honey for pre-fermentation sterilisation usually causes a precipitate. If a pasteurise a melomel will it also cause the honey precipitate to appear? If yes, should I then dissolve the honey in a higher temperature to get rid of the precipitate to avoid it after bottling? Is my question here clear? Thanks a lot for all your help.

 

[bernardsmith]

There is always a potential problem with pasteurization. You are deliberately allowing this mead to have enough CO2 to make it sparkling. Pasteurization increases the pressure inside the bottles as the gas expands when heated and if you have sealed those bottles then you are playing Russian Roulette: If you use corks those corks are likely to pop sending a column of liquid up to paint your walls and ceiling. If you seal with beer caps the cap will likely not leave the mouth of the bottle but the bottle may explode sending shards of sharp glass across the room. Exploding bottles are dangerous. And as Seamonkey84 notes, there are people who make cider who discuss pasteurization... but my money says that there are just as many folk who regret they tried this as there are people who claim that they did this without any problem. (You also need to know how long it takes to effectively pasteurize the volume of liquid you have in each bottle at the temperature you have selected (pasteurization is NOT another word for "boiling") AND you need to be able to measure and monitor that temperature INSIDE the bottles.