The Watermelon mead taboo?

[Jskeen]

I've tried this one a couple of times, with less than stellar results, but then again, most of my results have been less than stellar to date on the mead front. I've been, for lack of better information, one of those "I'm trying to stay simple and natural" kinda mead makers. It's simple and natural, I guess, but it usually is either cloyingly sweet, or all to similar to lighter fluid for my taste. So..... after a substantial investment in yeasts, nutrients, buffers and measuring gear, I have embarked upon a "modern" mead mixture to see if a faster, cleaner ferment, with happy, well fed yeasts can produce something that has a bit of that happy, summertime, watermelon taste, without the rocket fuel and saccharine accompaniments.

to append, here's the recipe;

almost 1 gal watermelon and apple juice
2c sugar
maple syrup to 1.099 IG

1/4 tsp K2CO3
just under 1/2 tsp fermaid K
just under 1/2 tsp fermaid O

half tsp goferm protect in 125ml hot water
at about 85f add half pack 71b yeast
temper twice to about must temp and pitch.


What do you guys think of my attempt, and the concept overall.
New photo by James Skeen
New photo by James Skeen

 

[wildmazer]

well, it's not a mead since there's no honey. but other than that it seems okay.

 

[Seamonkey84]

Watermelon takes a while to age before it’s good, you have to make sure the watermelon doesn’t go bad before it starts to ferment. winemaking: Watermelon Wines
Edit: since your doing a watermelon-apple juice combo, pitch yeast straight into apple juice first, let it go let going strong for a day or so as a starter. Then add your watermelon in, that way the ferment is going strong already and less chance of the watermelon going off. But during the ferment and when young, it will have a very... funky smell to it. Watermelon-raspberry wine

 

[Jskeen]

well, it's not a mead since there's no honey. but other than that it seems okay.

Yes, well, honestly, didn't want to waste good honey till I figured out how to get the juice fermented before it goes off. If this batch of wine works out, I'll actually do a real mead.

 

[bernardsmith]

Hi Jskeen, and welcome.
You are trying to make a really challenging wine. I don't know anyone who has successfully made a watermelon wine that they could even pretend to be proud of. In the first place watermelon has very little flavor once you remove (ferment) the sugar and in the second place watermelon seems to spoil in the time it takes for the yeast to move from their lag stage to active fermentation. But perhaps this is a commercially made soft drink ...in which case it may be full of sorbates to prevent it spontaneously fermenting. You checked that it is preservative free, right?

But here's the other thing: the demands of the yeast when faced with a nutritional desert like honey is very different from the demands of the yeast when fermenting fruit that may be high in nitrogen (apples?) and high in the minerals and compounds the yeast need to create and repair their cell walls etc. So I am not so sure that successfully making an apple -watermelon wine will provide you with the skills you need to make a good mead. The secret to learning how to make a good mead is to make what are called traditional meads - a mead made with only honey, water, yeast and nutrient. And sure, honey is not cheap... but there is no law that says that you must make 5 gallons of mead . You can practice with one gallon. You can practice with one quart. And if you need say 40 oz of honey to make a gallon of mead you need 10 oz of that same honey to make a quart. AND you can make five batches of one gallon each thus improving your skills FIVE times compared to making ONE batch of 5 gallons... and those same skills can be improved 20 times if you chose to make quarts of mead to practice those skills. Twenty batches , twenty lessons for the price of one that could be a complete flop... I dunno... I know what I would do... but hey, to each their own, as they say. to each their own.

Oh... and why both Fermaid K and O ? are they not essentially the same compounds?

 

[Seamonkey84]

Fermaid K has some trace nutrients that seem to be missing in fermaid O, at least according to the BOMM protocol. Tosna uses GoFerm for those elements, BOMM uses a single dose of fermaid K up front.

 

[Jskeen]

Hi Jskeen, and welcome.
You are trying to make a really challenging wine. I don't know anyone who has successfully made a watermelon wine that they could even pretend to be proud of. In the first place watermelon has very little flavor once you remove (ferment) the sugar and in the second place watermelon seems to spoil in the time it takes for the yeast to move from their lag stage to active fermentation. But perhaps this is a commercially made soft drink ...in which case it may be full of sorbates to prevent it spontaneously fermenting. You checked that it is preservative free, right?

But here's the other thing: the demands of the yeast when faced with a nutritional desert like honey is very different from the demands of the yeast when fermenting fruit that may be high in nitrogen (apples?) and high in the minerals and compounds the yeast need to create and repair their cell walls etc. So I am not so sure that successfully making an apple -watermelon wine will provide you with the skills you need to make a good mead. The secret to learning how to make a good mead is to make what are called traditional meads - a mead made with only honey, water, yeast and nutrient. And sure, honey is not cheap... but there is no law that says that you must make 5 gallons of mead . You can practice with one gallon. You can practice with one quart. And if you need say 40 oz of honey to make a gallon of mead you need 10 oz of that same honey to make a quart. AND you can make five batches of one gallon each thus improving your skills FIVE times compared to making ONE batch of 5 gallons... and those same skills can be improved 20 times if you chose to make quarts of mead to practice those skills. Twenty batches , twenty lessons for the price of one that could be a complete flop... I dunno... I know what I would do... but hey, to each their own, as they say. to each their own.

Oh... and why both Fermaid K and O ? are they not essentially the same compounds?

Thanks for your observations. I have successfully made hard cider, cyser meads, and traditional meads in the past with a few different protocols. I also have a few gallons of mead "Aging" or "hiding somewhere hoping they will eventually turn drinkable". Those would not to date include any variant containing watermelon juice, as previous attempts were discarded fairly quickly due to the tendency of watermelon juice to spoil, as you observed.

Having recently discovered Herr Denard's outstanding body of information on rapid brewing of meads, I was curious to see if an application of his principles might overcome this unfortunate tendency. I shall hopefully acquire a supply of his preferred yeast shortly, and will most likely try again with that, but having a supply of watermelon juice on hand, and everything else stipulated in the BOMM protocol, I decided to give it a try with my normal wine yeast, but rather than risk several more pounds of honey on an already questionable enterprise, I used sugar. Seemed to be a relatively small variable to change, and if it succeeds, even marginally, it will augur well for the full BOMM protocol trial to come.

As for the combination of Fermaid k up front with fermaid O, followed with later additions of fermaid 0, my understanding is that fermaid K includes DAP, which supplies an inorganic source of relatively free nitrogen, whereas fermaid O is essentially processed yeast cells that had recently metabolized nitrogen, and as such supplied it in a less available form, which acted to minimize spikes in yeast activity and temperature, and provide a more steady growth curve for the colony. As I understand there are also regulatory limits on the amount of Fermaid K that can be included by volume in mead, which would apply only to commercial production, nevertheless are allowed for in the current formulary.

 

[bernardsmith]

Interesting points about Fermaid K and O , I tend to use Wyeast's nutrients and don't have a problem with that but that is another story. Bray Denard's "BOMM" is a great approach but it is not the only approach. If you are familiar with Mary Izett's book Speed Brewing (Voyageur Press, 2015) she discusses how she makes short meads (low alcohol hydromels) ready for bottling in two or three weeks. Izett also uses ale yeast but she does not specify a specific strain and given her overall approach I think she uses dry yeast so it could US -05 or 04 or Nottingham. The basic idea being that ale yeast tends to be clean fermenting and so you can bottle very soon after fermentation has ended and with a low ABV the yeast should not be subject to stress, all other things aside. Indeed, her approach is to bottle just before the yeast have consumed all the sugar so that the mead is perceptibly "sweet" and will be carbonated (given the fact that the yeast will still be pumping out CO2 in the bottle and the gravity will fall inside the bottle from about 1.010 to ?? So the mead will either need to be stored very cold or consumed very quickly...

 

[Seamonkey84]

You can also up the flavor towards the end by making your own “f-pack” by freeze concentrating some watermelon juice.