Mead with Mangrove Jack yeast

For those making mead and related drinks
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MARMITE

Mead with Mangrove Jack yeast

Post by MARMITE » Mon Jul 04, 2016 4:05 pm

I've only made two batches of mead.
The first was with a wine yeast that came down from 1110 to 1040.I then pitched a champagne yeast which brought it down to1022.
The second batch using Mangrove Jack mead yeast also started off at 1110 but ended at 1005.
Has anyone else had the same experience?

fatbloke

Re: Mead with Mangrove Jack yeast

Post by fatbloke » Sat Jul 09, 2016 5:52 pm

MARMITE wrote:I've only made two batches of mead.
The first was with a wine yeast that came down from 1110 to 1040.I then pitched a champagne yeast which brought it down to1022.
The second batch using Mangrove Jack mead yeast also started off at 1110 but ended at 1005.
Has anyone else had the same experience?
Nope......

On your first batch, something you did went wrong. If it started at 1.110, then when it hit (or should have at least got close) 1.000 you'd have had a 110 drop which equates to 14.9% ABV - but given that a lot of wine yeasts are tolerant to 14% ABV, if the recipe or method was correct and it hit it's tolerance then it should have finished at 1.006 or 1.007, so for some reason it stopped giving you a 70 point drop that equals about 9.5% ABV

Even your addition of champoo yeast didn't help a lot as most of those are tolerant to 18% ABV which equals a 133 point drop.

You don't mention method or ingredients, but suffice to say that just honey and water isn't a good mix. Honey is by nature, nutrient poor. You need to use a nutrient addition, something like tronozymol (in the UK) or if you can get it, fermaidK but that's hard to find here.

I prefer using Lallemand products like the Lalvin yeast range and their fermaid range of nutrients, not because they're the best (they're good, but the best ? who knows....) but because they publish more data and technical spec for their products than any other maker. Then all you need to do is use them appropriately to achieve the desired result.

Whatever you did with the second batch, the yeast got to somewhere about I'd expect it to get to i.e. hit a tolerance of about the 14% ABV area. I don't generally believe in so called "mead yeasts" because there's no such thing i.e. the only person who calls it that is the manufacturer and how they want to market that particular strain - genuine mead yeast strains are pretty much unknown, because when mead was popular as a drink they know little or nothing about yeasts and how they work.

Whereas all wine yeasts will have been isolated from a specific region.

If the mead yeast worked well for you, then that's brilliant - I haven't used any of the Mangrove Jack range yet (still got plenty of my preferred Lalvin strains in stock).

Here is a link to a .pdf of an article written for Zymurgy magazine by the great Ken Schramm (look him up and you'll understand his knowledge and experience etc). Yes, it's not easy to mimic his methods if you can't get nutrients of a known content (as in nitrogen provision etc) to be able to add it for such accuracy, but you can get close by using what you should be able to get i.e. using tronozymol as it's easily obtained instead of fermaidk, DAP ? well not so easy to get in pure form easily but if you look, Youngs yeast nutrient has only 2 ingredients and one of them is DAP (the other is also a source of nitrogen). If you want to increase the amount of non-nitrogen elements in your mix, you can always just boil or microwave some bread yeast to make sure it's dead and then the live yeast can cannibalise it for the B vit elements (and yes, while the product you use for a screen name also has those, it's not advised to use as a source because of the high salt content).

Temperature and aeration are also important to allow for suitable fermentation criteria - actually, I know here people still like to use 1 gallon DJ's to ferment in but they're better off using a brewing bucket of whatever size that has an airlock grommet in the lid - because it's easy as hell for the ferment to foam like a fountain when you try to aerate it.

Temps ? well there are some yeasts that like warmer, some that like cooler. If you look at FB or forums that are used by many Americans, you will find many like Lalvin D47 but those of us who've used, tried etc, know that it's one that needs to be fermented cooler than 70F/21C otherwise it's known to produce a lot of fusels in meads and you get that "rocket fuel" note that takes a hell of a long time to mellow out (years often).

Aeration ? equally, many recipes and methods say about stirring the hell out of a base must, then once the yeast is pitched in, seal it with an airlock and let it finish. Erm...... no, yeast needs oxygen for development, so many of us will take the SG, then divide by 3 so we know where the "1/3rd sugar break" is - using a bucket makes it easy to measure gravity to monitor the meads progress and will remove the lid, give it a good stir to remove any dissolved CO2 a.k.a. carbonic acid which can skew gravity readings with bubbles and stir/aerate (I use an electric balloon whisk or stick blender) each time the gravity progress measurement is above the 1/3rd point.

pH is also a possible issue. If you have a pH meter (which aren't expensive and more accurate and easy to read than wine grade litmus paper strips) you'll find that while the must is very sweet tasting to start with, it's surprisingly acidic. That's not a bad thing necessarily, but if the pH drops below 3.0pH you can end up with a stuck/stalled ferment, so it's handy to have something to correct that if it happens or something to buffer the pH and prevent it dropping too low - potassium carbonate is understood to be the best for that as it not only buffers and corrects but also doesn't affect the flavour in any way - calcium based buffers can give a dusty/chalky note to the mead.

Sorry if that sounds like a lot to take in, but I hope it makes it clear enough that to make mead isn't hard but to make good mead, it isn't necessarily easy. Even a basic "traditional" type mead can always be improved..........

HTH some......

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