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Dryness and back sweeting

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monza282

NewBee
Registered Member
Nov 12, 2010
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Enfield, CT
I'm brewing mead for the first time. I used 6# of honey for a 2.5 gal batch. I pitched Red Star Premier Cuvée yeast and left it in the primary for 14 days, adding ¼ teaspoon yeast energizer, diammonium phosphate and Wyeast beer nutrient each every 12 hours for the first 48 hours with a og of 1.0937. After racking to the secondary and taking a reading the gravity was .9806. Making it about 14.75% ABV.

The problem is that although the mead is still very green it had a dryness to it. My question is how do i back sweeten and when? I would like to have it be a sparkling mead. So do I have to add more yeast if i put a stablizer in it?

Thanks in advance, Monza282
 
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wayneb

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Feb 7, 2007
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Evergreen, CO (west of and above the Denver smog!)
Hi, Monza! Welcome to "Gotmead!" If you search on the terms "backsweetening" and "stabilizing" you'll see that there are lots of threads already covering your question in great detail, so I'll only summarize some quick thoughts for you here. First of all, backsweetening succeeds only when you know for sure that your yeast are finished fermenting, and the only ways to do that reliably are to sub-micron filter (generally expensive for a new meadmaker to consider), or to treat the mead with potassium metabisulphite and potassium sorbate before adding the sweetener. It is also almost impossible to successfully create a sparkling sweet mead in the bottle, since it is difficult to impossible to stop an ongoing fermentation in the bottle, and most yeast strains that can successfully bottle carbonate a mead will also continue to ferment until pressures in the bottle become dangerously high - potentially creating bottle bombs. Sweet carbonated meads are most often done by force carbonating a stabilized sweet mead in a keg, using CO2 gas.

That info, plus a little use of the search tool here in the forums, should get you all the info that you're looking for.
 
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