First off, from what ive found here...this forum is EXACTLY what i was looking for and the people here are extremely knowledgeable and from what i read, LOVE the craft of brewing mead! So with that i hope yall can give me some pointers and insight on what my mead will turn out to be and how long.
I am a seasoned beer brewer but just brewed my first 5 gal batch of mead 1 week ago in a 5 gallon glass carboi. I pasturized my honey at 150 deg F for 30 min.
My ingredients are as follows.
14 Pounds of dark unfiltered raw wildflower honey
1 tbs of yeast nutrient
2 packets of lalvin D-47 wine yeast
And thats all folks. My OG was 1.112
I just started degassing as per everyones recommendation here. I wasnt aware of degassing until today reading this forum.
Anyways, i would like to extend my hello to everyone and see what your input is on how this will turn out, along with fermentation length, how many times it should be racked, how long it should age before and after bottleing.
Or ANY tips on the proccess that will help this turn out awesome.
I am a HUGE fan of medieval lore and fantasy and thought it would be fun to brew some mead and take a step back in time since mead is claimed to be the oldest alcoholic beverage of mankind. So I wanted to brew just a straight up mead...since ive never even tasted it before.
I am very excited to be doing this and sure i will be brewing mead on the regular. Very intriguing craft to me, and would love to learn all i can and plan to be at home here on gotmead. Thank you!
Welcome......
Just a minor "pick up" though. I'd have been better to have starter your own thread.... the one you've tagged onto is not that recent, but some might still think of it as incorrect.....
Anyway......
1.112 isn't drastically high to start so that's good. It's well worth reading the newbee guide linked left in the yellow box, despite beer experience. You'll notice similarities but also some techniques that'd be considered heresy to a beer maker.
With your current ingredients, 1 pack of yeast would have been fine but 2 packs isn't an issue. D47 carries a caveat, inasfaras, it's known to produce fusels if fermented at over 70f/21C. A nice whack of nutrient, great. Yet its worth thinking along the lines of energiser instead.
Honey is famously low in both nitrogen and non-nitrogen and problems like stinky batches are connected to lack of thiamine as well as nitrogen. So things you might notice are staggered nutrients and the mixed nature i.e. energiser and nutrient, but I err toward 2 parts energiser to ensure enough of the non-nitrogen elements but then top up with 1 part DAP for the extra nitrogen (Ken Schramm's nutrient article from Zymurgy mag is linked in my blog and shows why it can help to use Lalvin stuff because they publish more data than any other maker - other nutrients are available of course, just that Lallemand are better for the info to work the numbers).
If you tried commercial meads, theyre not always the best guide to taste, because a lot of them are "dessert" type meads and can be cloyingly sweet. Equally, I'd suggest that you may well find that if your batch ferments dry or pretty close to, you will instantly learn whats meant by "young mead nastiness". People find this surprising - though I'd allege this is because we're so familiar with the mega sweetness of honey we just don't understand how it tastes when the sugar has been fermented out.
Presuming you'll be finding this, there's 2 possible methods to sort it out. 1) read up about ageing the brew once its cleared - this has the downside of taking a long(ish) time relatively speaking, but give it say 6 months and you'll notice a huge difference, its usually a massive change....... or 2) you can back sweeten it (for the best results IMO from the original honey). The downside of this is that if you wait till until its cleared before sweetening, honey can cause a haze that either needs aging out or needing finings to clear.
I routinely use the second method but I ferment dry, then stabilise, then sweeten with honey to a "medium" sort of level (1.010-1.015) then clear it and invariably age it in bulk. If you bottle once clear, bottle in a mix of sizes as smaller bottles can be used for testing the aging progress.......
Hopefully that lot helps explain some of the nuances and difference between beer and mead making.......