Reducing perceived sweetness in a mead

[bklynbrewer]

About one year ago I made a mead from a NB kit with 20 lbs of orange blossom honey. I listened to the archive about mead and took copious notes. Rehydrated the yeast, slowly added a bit of must to it before adding the yeast to the main batch. Over the next few days I dosed it with Fermade K and diammonium phosphate as well as performed some minor aeration with a ladle. I may not have mixed the water/honey completely, my OG was somewhere in the area of 1.14-1.15. After primary fermentation, about a month, I racked it into a better bottle where it has sat in a basement for the last 12 months. I just had a chance to try it and to me, it was still awfully sweet. I took a gravity reading, and much to my surprise it came out at 1.014-1.020.

Since I am not a big fan of sweetness, I my original plan was for a dry mead, but that does not seem to be what I got. I am considering adding cranberry or cherry juice to bottle it in order to reduce the sweetness. Any thoughts or ideas on the matter?

[pbts]

The first mead I brewed, I used Danstar's English ale yeast and it turned out very sweet (and fabulous).
For the second mead I used WYeast's mead / champagne yeast, and it turned out very dry, almost like a chardonnay. That surprised me. I'm not a fan of dry meads, so I won't do that again.

What kind of yeast did you use?

[bklynbrewer]

This is the yeast and my procedure:
Lalvman’s 71b-1122 15g ( I think that was 2 or 3 packets)
20 g Go Ferm Yeast hydrating yeast additive
50 ml/water per pack 104 degrees F
Use cake pan to re-hydrate yeast, drop yeast on the water, don’t stir
Ladle in small amount of must over 30 mins, every 10 mins to slowly acclimate yeast to the must

[ipaisay2.0]

adding a cherry or any other fruit concentrate to your mead will probably only add more "sweetness" to your mead, as concentrates usually have a sugar added to them. With your numbers of OG and FG. Enjoy that mead! Nice job. You could always dilute your mead at serving with a bit of de-chlorinated water to help dry it out. at the very least try that method and see if you like your mead then. Maybe it's not the sweetness you are tasting that is troubling you, but the mead itself.

If you like dry meads. Start with about 12 lbs of honey and ferment the way you describe. I bet your mead turns out drier and you'll still get about a 9% ABV mead.

[bklynbrewer]

I had never thought about a straight water dilution, I will have to give that a whirl. Do products such as Oregon fruit puree add sugar before packaging?

[Bugeater]

Using 20# of honey in a 5 gallon batch is the problem. What you have is known as a sack mead, i.e. a high gravity mead. These are normally sweet due to the alcohol tolerance of the yeast. 71-B normally craps out somewhere around 14% ABV. You must have done something right as you got it to somewhere in the 16-17% range.

A champagne yeast would have had a higher tolerance and would have gotten it quite a bit drier. At this point there is not much of anything you can do since there is too much alcohol already to allow for significant growth of an otherwise alcohol tolerant yeast.

Increasing the acidity a bit with some kind of citrus may help. I have a sack mead (1.126 -> 1.024) that would be way too sweet for me if I hadn't made it with some oranges and limes. You might try a glass with a measured amount of lemon or lime juice to see if that helps.

If that doesn't do it, you may need to find someone who likes sweet meads to drink it for you.

Good luck,

Wayne

[bklynbrewer]

Thanks bugeater, I will take that into consideration for the next batch. I think 20lbs is what came with the NB kit.

[ipaisay2.0]

Try Carbonating (add 2 volumes) your mead as well. However, you would have to keg it for I do not think that you would find a yeast to work at that high of a ABV to give you worthy results if bottle conditioning. The Co2 will lower the acidity some as well to help with your beverage.

Sometimes I'll even add some freshly squeezed lemon juice to a cider to help with the acidity balance. bugeaters lime and oranges should help to some degree too.

Whenever you add fruit to your mead, you'll be adding some sugar to your mead either real fruit fructose or human added sucrose/glucose. Unless you use an artificial fruit concentrate. <-Who knows what that will bring to the mead?