On Yeast and Mead

[tavish2]

well, you can apply the same method to a beer yeast. i have had good luck with getting about 85% attenuation out of the cal ale yeast in meads and having them finish at about 1.008 FG. if you plan ahead and pick the right yeast you can get exactly what you want without having to use a bunch of chemicals to make a great mead.

[Disco_Fetus]

Thanks so much for the insight! I'm going to pick-up honey this weekend and I think I will go with a white wine yeast. Save the beer yeasts for a braggot.

[dontblake]

You'd be surprised what different yeasts do to mead!
A year or 2 ago, Janis Gross from the AHA gave a talk at our homebrew club meeting and she shared the results of a very cool experiment.
She fermented the same must with 6 or 8 different yeasts and brought samples for us to try. The honey character was remarkably different for each of them. If I remember correctly, D47 (cote du rhone, I think) was the tastiest. She even had some beer yeasts in the mix (Cal ale, English ale and Belgian ale). Those sucked.
Be sure to oxygenate and provide food (nitrogen, especially), as honey is low in nutrients. A daily dose of O2, fermaid K, and DAP help a lot in the first couple of days of fermentation.

[Midnight0666]

I made a mead last year with US-05 yeast...it was NASTY. US-05 is my Go-to yeast for beer, but it left some nasty flavors in the mead. I usually stick with Lalvin D47 (I think that's the number) for most meads and ciders. Works well for me.

With mead and cider, I find that yeast choice isn't terribly critical and you actually want a neutral yeast that won't get in the way of the honey or fruit flavor. Also, what works great in beer doesn't necessarily have the same effects in mead or cider. For example, the beloved Belgian beer yeasts don't necessarily give out the same desirable spicy phenolics when you use them for mead, cider, etc. I haven't made a mead with beer yeast yet, but I imagine it would have less alcohol tolerance than wine or mead yeast, which could result in a sweeter, higher FG beverage than if the standard wine or mead yeast was used. This could be good or bad depending what you want, but also less predictable. The wine yeasts will tend to finish in the 0.990s for gravity. If you want a sweeter mead, you can rack often and add sorbate and sulfite to stun or kill the yeast, and backsweeten to taste.

I still have lots to learn, but that's my general understanding of how yeast relates to mead (as well as my current fling, cider).

[Ironman]

My brother started beekeeping this year. He gave me 15 # of honey from his hive. I was thinking of using d-47 but I need to know if it will add a lot of its own esters. This honey has a light flavor like anise or tea which I want to preserve. Maybe I should use champagne yeast?