Which yeast is your favorite dry yeast for making mead?

[RPh_Guy]

Any photos of how you're making them?

I am still in design and testing stages. It's not as easy as I thought.

 

[NeverDie]

Update: QA23 has passed its second sugar break and is now under airlock. That means all the yeasts in the yeast roundup are now under airlock, and all that remains is to wait for them all to finish fermenting. It appears that one may have already finished fermenting, and it seems that a number of others are nearly done also.

So, this does raise the question as to whether I should wait for all of them to finish before I start tasting them, or whether I should do it as they complete. I think it would be fairer to do them as they finish, because otherwise some will have the advantage of additional aging. What do you guys think?

 

[Miraculix]

Update: QA23 has passed its second sugar break and is now under airlock. That means all the yeasts in the yeast roundup are now under airlock, and all that remains is to wait for them all to finish fermenting. It appears that one may have already finished fermenting, and it seems that a number of others are nearly done also.

So, this does raise the question as to whether I should wait for all of them to finish before I start tasting them, or whether I should do it as they complete. I think it would be fairer to do them as they finish, because otherwise some will have the advantage of additional aging. What do you guys think?

I think you should do both. Make good notes the first time!

 

[NeverDie]

I think you should do both. Make good notes the first time!

OK. So, do you guys want to read only my bottom line conclusions at the very end of everything, or do you want to read my notes as I develop them?

 

[Miraculix]

OK. So, do you guys want to read only my bottom line conclusions at the very end of everything, or do you want to read my notes as I develop them?

I really enjoy this thread and the ongoing input from your side and everybody else, so for me it would be nice to have some quick updates when you taste test and then of course the fully detailed final results at the end.

 

[Maylar]

Update: QA23 has passed its second sugar break and is now under airlock. That means all the yeasts in the yeast roundup are now under airlock, and all that remains is to wait for them all to finish fermenting. It appears that one may have already finished fermenting, and it seems that a number of others are nearly done also.

So, this does raise the question as to whether I should wait for all of them to finish before I start tasting them, or whether I should do it as they complete. I think it would be fairer to do them as they finish, because otherwise some will have the advantage of additional aging. What do you guys think?

For the extra time that it takes for the rest of them to finish, I think the effects of "aging" will be zilch. We're talking a week or two, not months. I would wait till they're all finished and have a tasting party.

 

[Miraculix]

For the extra time that it takes for the rest of them to finish, I think the effects of "aging" will be zilch. We're talking a week or two, not months. I would wait till they're all finished and have a tasting party.

Yeah, you're probably right.

 

[NeverDie]

When they're all finished I expect they will have all fermented dry, so I'll be needing to backsweeten them, or at least samples of them, as part of the taste test, because I prefer sweet meads and, ultimately, that is the taste that will matter most to me. Not sure that I can standardize the backsweetening though.

 

[Maylar]

Maybe rack them to quart mason jars? Having the same volume for each would make backsweetening simpler, it'd mean adding a measured amount of honey for each. Plus/minus whatever differences there are in final gravity. I would pick off-dry, like 1.005 as the test point so as not to cover up the subtle nuances in taste with too much honey.

 

[bmd2k1]

When they're all finished I expect they will have all fermented dry, so I'll be needing to backsweeten them, or at least samples of them, as part of the taste test, because I prefer sweet meads and, ultimately, that is the taste that will matter most to me. Not sure that I can standardize the backsweetening though.

Pick a yeast that cold crashes great & has an alcohol tolerance in the ballpark ya want -- and you'll never have to backsweeten [emoji111] (That's exactly what I do for my ciders [emoji57]. ...and my 2 fav yeasts are D47 & S04 to get er done.)

Cheers & looking forward to your overall results.

 

[NeverDie]

Pick a yeast that cold crashes great & has an alcohol tolerance in the ballpark ya want -- and you'll never have to backsweeten [emoji111] (That's exactly what I do for my ciders [emoji57]. ...and my 2 fav yeasts are D47 & S04 to get er done.)

Cheers & looking forward to your overall results.

Really? Gosh, there are some many different viewpoints on this. I had thought the current received wisdom was that alcohol tolerance was too variable, even using the same yeast from the exact same batch of yeast, to get good enough repeatable results. Yet, you seem to be achieving it anyway.

 

[bmd2k1]

Really? Gosh, there are some many different viewpoints on this. I had thought the current received wisdom was that alcohol tolerance was too variable, even using the same yeast from the exact same batch of yeast, to get good enough repeatable results. Yet, you seem to be achieving it anyway.

Yeppers -- I've been extremely happy with the consistency of my results w/ciders using this protocol over the past year. 1st attempt at a hobo vino underway -- lets see if it translates to grapes [emoji111]

 

[NeverDie]

Yeppers -- I've been extremely happy with the consistency of my results w/ciders using this protocol over the past year. 1st attempt at a hobo vino underway -- lets see if it translates to grapes [emoji111]

Grapes or not, I'm wondering whether it translates to meads or not. Supposedly 71B is more "predictable", at least according to Schramm, that maybe that would work with 71B. I hope so, because it would certainly be less work if I didn't have to stabilize and then backsweeten.

 

[Maylar]

The thing is with mead you can and usually will push a yeast beyond its stated limits using the latest protocol. That means 16% with most yeasts and that's a lot. With a traditional you really want to stay in the 11% range if you want your mead to be balanced and drinkable in a reasonable amount of time. IMO it's far more controllable and predictable to ferment dry and backsweeten after stabilizing it.

 

[NeverDie]

The thing is with mead you can and usually will push a yeast beyond its stated limits using the latest protocol. That means 16% with most yeasts and that's a lot. With a traditional you really want to stay in the 11% range if you want your mead to be balanced and drinkable in a reasonable amount of time. IMO it's far more controllable and predictable to ferment dry and backsweeten after stabilizing it.

^This. It's a compelling argument.

 

[DevilDogmeadguy]

^This. It's a compelling argument.

He is right though, not an argument so much as it is a fact. I can finish and have ready to bottle in two weeks a traditional Mead that has an ABV of around 10-12%. Lower sugar content takes less time to ferment out and is much easier to manage and is more predictable. Take gravity readings daily and finish around 1.01-1.02. If you could crash and drop the temp of your Mead close to freezing you won't have to add anything, the yeast goes into hibernation and drop out allowing you to rack everything in one step. Then bulk age or bottle. Pretty simple.

 

[NeverDie]

I had heard that 14% ABV was optimal for mead, but if it's actually 11% or 10-12%, then so much the better.

Looking at the 3 different bottles of Schramm mead that I have, two are 14% and one is 12.5%. I'm not saying that Schramm is the final word on the topic, but for guidance it's perhaps useful to see what the ABV's are for a sampling of gold medalist meads and see what the median and standard deviation are.

 

[FunkyMunk]

I had heard that 14% ABV was optimal for mead, but if it's actually 11% or 10-12%, then so much the better.

Looking at the 3 different bottles of Schramm mead that I have, two are 14% and one is 12.5%. I'm not saying that Schramm is the final word on the topic, but for guidance it's perhaps useful to see what the ABV's are for a sampling of gold medalist meads and see what the median and standard deviation are.

I believe that 14% will be more flavorful than 11%, but will take longer for the hot alcohol flavor to age out and for the subtle honey nuances to shine through. Not that I have much experience, but I do know that the 14% traditional I made was much better after a year in the bottle.

 

[gratus fermentatio]

In the immortal words of Jack Keller:
"Choose your yeast like you would choose a tool."
Meaning choose the right yeast to achieve the desired end product. Different yeast strains do different things & have different results. Some work better for some applications than others. Yeast is not a "one size fits all" type of organism.
Regards, GF.

 

[NeverDie]

Update:
For deciding when a fermentation was "finished," I was planning to apply the criteria that the ferment hadn't dropped by 1 or more grams after a period of 3 days. However, I may need to revisit that, because I had two which met that criteria, but had dropped an additional gram by the subsequent 3rd day.

Anyhow, applying that criteria anyway, then 3 of the test yeasts would have finished.

1. 71B, which started on 3/4/2019 and finished on 4/4. It is very clear.
2. Premier Cuvee, which started on 3/3/2019 and finished on 4/1. Has a heavy haze and doesn't look clear.
3. Fresco, started 3/8 and finished 4/1/2019. Also a heavy haze and doesn't look clear.

As of today, though, #2 and #3 have dropped another gram since their last measurement on 4/1/2019. Some of this may be quantization error, as my scale has 1 gram resolution.

Anyhow, I'm going to switch to measuring about once per week instead of every 3 days, because it takes more time and effort than you'd think to do all the measurements.

As I pointed out on a different thread, measuring by weight is actually more sensitive than measuring SG, because for every point of change in SG, there are multiple grams dropped. I'm sure that if I were going purely by SG, then I'd probably be declaring many more of the yeasts as already finished.

 

[Maylar]

Do you have a direct correlation between weight and SG for each of them? I appreciate the simplicity and the applied technology behind weighing, but SG numbers should ultimately be known. Yeah, it's a lot of bottles (hope you have a baster), but...

It'll be interesting to see how much variation there is in final gravities.

 

[FunkyMunk]

As I pointed out on a different thread, measuring by weight is actually more sensitive than measuring SG, because for every point of change in SG, there are multiple grams dropped. I'm sure that if I were going purely by SG, then I'd probably be declaring many more of the yeasts as already finished.

To which thread are you referring here? Maybe this has been discussed there, but a few issues come to mind:
1) assuming the drop in weight is due to CO2 escaping, you would need to be degas thoroughly before you weigh your mead each time, since a lot of CO2 can remain in suspension.
2) scale accuracy/precision (which you already brought up)
3) to add to Maylar's very helpful post: hypothetically, you could have a stalled fermentation, where the yeast craps out (or just gets really, really slow) with a lot of residual sugar remaining, and knowing just that the weight isn't changing without knowing the corresponding SG will not tell you this; I admit that my experience is very limited, but I would have a hard time saying that a mead is "finished" if the SG is say, 1.020, when the yeast would have been expected to take it down to 1.000 or so. (This recently happened to me!)

 

[NeverDie]

To which thread are you referring here?

https://www.homebrewtalk.com/forum/threads/weighing-your-bomm.663190/page-2

So far most of the effort has gone into identifying the first and second sugar break using weight measurements, and the data there seems pretty good.

Definitely the off-gassing of CO2 at the end may be throwing off the final call as to when finished has happened. Doing it by weight may prove conservative because of that. My original plan was to degass at the end using a vacuum chamber. However, that has been delayed until I can return it to ordinary atmospheric pressure using only CO2 (so as to avoid oxygen).

 

[Miraculix]

The continuing off-gassing after fermentation finished will lower the weight continuously even when nothing is happening anymore. Kind of like the airlock that keeps bubbeling although the beer is already finished. Degassing would help I guess.

 

[NeverDie]

The continuing off-gassing after fermentation finished will lower the weight continuously even when nothing is happening anymore. Kind of like the airlock that keeps bubbeling although the beer is already finished. Degassing would help I guess.

I have a batch of traditional mead that I made using Fresco (separate from the yeast roundup), and by all rights it should be finished already, because on 3/27 it had a very steady measured SG of 0.996. It has, however, continued dropping weight since then. I'm degassing it today in a vacuum chamber (in progress as I type this), and I'll see if that halts it from dropping any more grams of weight, or not.

It may also be that the yeast getting to finished follows an exponential decay curve, and it may simply take much longer than usually assumed (if the less sensitive SG measurement is used for deciding) for all of the yeast to truly be finished. After all, we're talking about roughly 100 billion yeast or so in a fermentation.

 

[Blacksmith1]

Have you considered weight loss from evaporation? I mean these are not sealed containers.
Just an idea that popped in my head.

 

[NeverDie]

Have you considered weight loss from evaporation? I mean these are not sealed containers.
Just an idea that popped in my head.

They have airlocks on. If it's not bubbling, I don't think it's much of a factor, if any.

 

[Blacksmith1]

Like I said just a thought.

 

[NeverDie]

I deemed D47 and 71B to both be finished, so I sampled them both just to get a feel for what is going on. They both taste about the same. There's a subtle difference that I don't have the vocabulary to describe, but it's a very small difference.

 

[Miraculix]

Maybe you want to do two runs of tasting at the end, first the dry mead and then on another day the same mead but with a specified amount of sugar to backsweeten it. I think some of the flavours hide in the absence of sugar therefore to try both would be interesting.