Making Better Mead with Tiantai mead brewing equipment

Tiantai provide complete mead brewing equipment. Mead wears many faces. Almost all of them can be slotted into two categories: sweet mead or dry. Though mead is often thought of as a sweet drink, everyone has their own preference. Sweet mead has the wonderful honey sweetness many drinkers are looking for, while dry mead showcases the other ingredients in their purest form.
mead brewing equipment, fermentation tank, mead fermenter unitank, co2 tank, mead carbonation tank

mead brewing equipment, fermentation tank, mead fermenter unitank, co2 tank, mead carbonation tank

Some tips as below:

1. Mead is not wine.
Though mead is similar to wine in many ways, it differs greatly when it comes to the starting and finishing gravities. Wine is usually limited by the sugar that the grapes can provide, which keeps most wine in the 1.080-1.110 range, or about 12-15% alcohol by volume.

Most wine yeast can handle this alcohol content range without trouble, and usually will ferment the wine dry, meaning no or very little sugar remaining. On a hydrometer this is somewhere in the range of 0.994-1.000 or so.

2. Know your yeast.
Your yeast has a big job ahead of it.

Honey is so concentrated that you can make your starting gravity whatever you'd like. You could easily start at 1.140, for example. If a mead of this sugar content were to ferment dry, it would be over 19% alcohol. Most wine yeasts, however, cannot withstand this level of alcohol and will stop fermenting before all the sugars are gone. That means that some sugars will be left over, which will make the mead sweet or semi-sweet.

3. Always, always age.
You should still age the mead after sweetening to make sure that all fermentation has stopped (and check to see if the gravity remains constant). It will also give your mead more depth and maturity of flavor.

4. Taste-test & adjust as needed.
Sweet meads can be anywhere up to about 1.040 in finishing gravity. Very sweet and strong meads are sometimes called "sack" mead. The sweetness is usually balanced by the alcohol content as well as the acidity. If you wind up with a mead that is too sweet adding some acid can help balance it out.

If you are back-sweetening (adding sugar/honey to a completed fermentation, as in the potassium sorbate example), you can add honey to taste by adding it in small increments and taking samples.

5. Bonus: Try out carbonation in fermentation tank.
If you are trying to make carbonated sweet mead, forced carbonation with CO2 is the only way to go. Priming sugar won't work, as the yeast cannot consume the remaining sugars. But a kegging system, a co2 tank, or mead carbonation tank or mead fermenter unitank works quite well.

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Emily Gong

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