nutrient/energizer

it all depends on what you want as a finished product if ou just want a show mead (water, honey, yeast) then you dont need nutrients but it will take longer will more than likely need ageing and will probly stall out on you

You can always just use water,honey and yeast but it'll take you a long time until the fermentation is done.

The nutrients and energizer helps to feed the yeast of the missing nutrients in the honey and makes them work better.

I would suggest that you use them and usualy the instructions are on the packs. As for the yeast usualy you use the whole pack but again look at the instructions

also can you clarify if you are useing imperial or metric gallons makes a 3% abv%potential difference between the 2 (15% imp) vs (18%)

bigdan110 said:

also can you clarify if you are useing imperial or metric gallons makes a 3% abv%potential difference between the 2 (15% imp) vs (18%)

Click to expand...

erm ? did you mean imperial or US gallons Dan ? as those are the more usual units here, though some down under, Canada and mainland Europe will make 5 litre batches.......

Plus, for skuli.......

The terms nutrient and energiser (a ha, energiser in the first post is spelled with a Z, so probably in the US.......it helps to put a city/state in your profile as you'd be surprised how handy local knowledge really is.....) anyway, where was I, oh yes, nutrient and energiser are sort of misleading, because they can be interchanged.

What's normally discussed as nutrient is D.A.P. a.k.a. di-ammonium phosphate, which is a source of inorganic nitrogen. It's looks quite like white crystals, and not unsimilar to table sugar.

Whereas "energiser" is a combined nutrient with other materials. It often looks like a tan/beige coloured powder. There's many brands and it depends on where you get it as to which brand might be available. They're like FermaidK, Fermax, or over here, tronozymol is quite popular/easily available.

If you wanted to use only one, then it would be wisest to go for the energiser/tan coloured powder one like FermaidK (which gets mentioned a lot here, as it seems it's reasonably easy to get, but also is one of the few materials like that, that will explain the "YAN" figure - yeast available nitrogen). It's got some DAP in it anyway, so it covers all bases.

Many recipes here also say to use both, that's because you'd use the energiser as the base nutrition, but then give it a boost with the DAP/nutrient material. There's many ideas about the mix, but I tend to go for a standard mix of 2 parts energiser to 1 part nutrient. I add at about 1 to 2 teaspoons per gallon, but I decide on which then split that into 3, with 2/3rds going in once I see signs of fermentation in a batch, whether that's airlock activity or just some tiny bubbles rising to the surface. The rest of the mix will go in when the starting gravity has dropped by 1/3rd.

I don't start my batches with stupidly high gravities. It's possible to start batches like that, but IMO it's asking for trouble, so I start my brews at the 1.100 to 1.110 sort of area.

Have a read of the "New Bee guide". It's a bit of a read but has lots of good info/guidance for the new mead maker in it.....

that would be what i ment FB my brain is not working today to much resarch not enuf sleep makes my brain do silly things :BangHead:

I describe them as an insurance policy. If you don't use them there is a 70-80% chance your mead will ferment to the result you are expecting, although slowly. If you use them you raise that to a 90% chance of good fermentation. You also get the side benefit of the ferment finishing sooner.