3 Common Mead Problems - And how to fix them! (sour, watery, or too sweet)

on this episode of doing the most we are going to look at three of the most common meadmaking mishaps and what you can do to go about fixing them [Music] creation fermentation inebriation doing the most we get a lot of email in the doing the most email account and uh of course there are a lot of questions on our discord server too and a lot of the things that i hear from brand new meadmakers they kind of fall into three different categories categories of flavors that they're trying to hide or improve upon and so in this video we're going to talk about the three most common mishaps at least from what i've seen on the internet the three most common mishaps that happen during meat making first off you might be saying to yourself my meat is too sour what can i do about it well it's important to remember that fermented honey water mead does kind of taste sour at the beginning and especially if it's a higher abv it might taste really sour and that's because alcohol is an acid so it's not going to taste like sweet delicious alcoholic nectar it's it's going to taste like acid and floral compounds and a lot of times some of that will age out as the mead sits and mellows and kind of becomes more cohesive sometimes you might need balancing to fix that you might need to add a little bit more honey maybe you need to pasteurize or stabilize and then back sweeten with honey so that way it will remain sweet after you sweeten it back up even just a little bit of sweetness in a mead that's really really dry might be enough to balance out that tart or sour or acid kind of note that you might be sensing in there and this is especially true if you've made a mead with a lot of fruit a big fruit load because a lot of times fruit is going to bring a lot of acidity with it so not only do you have the acidity of the honey and of the alcohol but then you have the acids from the fruit in there as well again some sweetness can help mitigate that now there are times where a mead being really sour might be something totally different for example a lactic acid bug might have gotten in there and generated some lactic acid turning your meat into essentially a sour style mead and at that point i would suggest just lean into it maybe sweeten it a little bit but just understand that it's going to be sour maybe hit it with some citrus zest or something to complement the sourness that's in there just like a sour beer these types of sour meats are relatively manageable to fix however there's one type that's not and that's if an acetic acid bacteria has gotten in there and turned your mead into vinegar and you would know it would taste like vinegar if you've ever had vinegar you would know if your meat has turned into vinegar and at that point i would still suggest you lean into it cooking with meat vinegar can be a fun departure from things like red wine vinegar and apple cider vinegar so you know what if that's the case let it finish turning into vinegar bottle away and use it in the kitchen secondly i often hear people say my mead is watery and thin and flat and flabby what can i do about my watery mead well generally that means it's lacking body and there are some simple things you can do to add body like add tannin tannin tends to help give a mead some staying power i like to call it a grip it lets it kind of grab onto your palate and hold on just a little bit longer so it feels like it's got a little bit more density to it tannins great you can use powdered wine tannins like grape tint in our chestnut tan or you can make a little bit of really really strong tea and dose it with that until you get the tannin level where you like it you can also build out the body by using a non-fermentable sweetener like lactose which brings a little bit of viscosity to it and it will bring a slight bit of sweetness to it and it also does bring some creaminess to it so if you're gonna add a spooky powder to your mead to bring the heft up a little bit i would suggest using maltodextrin maltodextrin is really cheap it's relatively natural it's a food additive and a little bit goes a long way and so a little bit of maltodextrin just to build out the body can be a really simple fix on a bodyless mead another consideration with a watery or a flabby mead might be that it is low abv like is it eight percent or below does it kind of fall in that hydromel or session meat category it might taste a little watery if you haven't done anything to really build up the tannin structure or if you haven't carbonated it so if it's not stable if you haven't put stabilizers in there you might add just a little bit of priming sugar in there usually that dosage for like a 12 ounce bottle would be about a teaspoon but trust me you want to use an online priming sugar calculator so that way you calculate it safely but a little bit of carbonation and a bottle condition session mead can haft up the mouth feel just by virtue of having all of those bubbles kind of carrying the mead around your mouth or if you don't want it carbonated but you have pasteurized or stabilized it add a little bit more honey honey brings with it sugars and sugars increase the density and viscosity of the meat also so you might just try sweetening it up a little bit and see if that kind of gets it to that body level that you're looking for and lastly i hear a folks saying my meat is too sweet what can i do to fix that my first question is generally has your meat stalled did your yeast not reach its alcohol tolerance but the yeast still gave out due to any number of factors from poor nutrition too low of ph low temperature you know any of the environmental things that can cause a meat to stall depending on where your mead stalled out and why it's stalled out you might be able to get it unstuck and get fermentation back on track i'm not going to go through all the things you can do to unstick a stuck fermentation here but there are some simple things like stirring the leaves back in raising the temperature a little bit making a yeast starter getting it really active with go firm and then pitching that in on the reddit r slash mead wiki there is a really comprehensive article on how to unstall a stalled mead and i'm gonna put a link to it in the description it really walks you through an assessment in the process and i'd recommend checking that out if you've got a stall on your hands another thing you can do to fix a mead that is finished too sweet is dilute it now there's a chance that that might restart fermentation because your alcohol concentration and sugar concentration will now be lower so be wary of that but especially if it's stabilized or pasteurized you might try diluting it just to thin out that sweetness a little bit and you can just do that with bottled spring water if you're careful enough to not mix in too much oxygen but the real pro move is to have a dry traditional mead maybe in the range of 12 to 15 alcohol that you just keep on hand and its sole intention is for blending into meads that need a little bit of dilution or need some of their flavors kind of toned down a little bit for the last several months i've had a dry mango blossom traditional mead sitting over here that i've used to blend into a few things including a really high abv mango blossom traditional that did and sweet and needed some smoothing out some some dilution in order to bring that sweet flavor profile back just a little bit and lastly for too sweet mead you might just want to play with acid balance there's a chance that hitting it with some citric malic tartaric or some other brewing acid might add a little bit of a pop a little bit of a burst of something that kind of plays against the sweetness and kind of distracts from it a little bit but also just kind of balances it out especially in like a big big fruited mead especially like with those no water fruit meads you might need quite a bit of sweetness to combat all the acid that comes from the fruit what we're talking about is the other end if it's too sweet maybe bringing up the acid profile a little bit bringing down the ph a little bit could help offset some of that sweetness as we move into the shipping window for mead stampede 2022 i thought it would be fun to put out this video on mead mishaps and how to fix them and i'm curious do you have alternate routes to fix some of these things or are there mead mishaps that you've heard about really frequently that you think should have been addressed here address them down in the comments leave a comment here about your mead mishaps or ways to fix them and of course if you found this video helpful please subscribe if you haven't already you just click the subscribe button right below this video and ring that bell for notifications about our new content also please follow us on social media join our discord community which has a ton of very active and very helpful meadmakers that i really appreciate and they are standing by to help you out be your newest bestest friend and you know just like show you how cool the doing the most community is they're great people over there on the discord you should check it out until next time i'm wishing you a happy safe and mishap-free meadmaking adventure take care and cheers [Music] you

Channel: Doin' the Most Brewing

Views: 12,832

Keywords: beer, wine, cider, mead, howto, brew, homebrewing, home brew, hacks, tips, tricks, beginner, amateur, novice, tips and tricks, homebrew tips, homebrewing hacks, homebrewing tricks, advice for beginners, make beer at home, make mead at home, how to make mead, how to make wine, homebrewing tips, homebrewing advice, siphoning pulp, hydrometer, wine kit, beer kit, mead nutrients, beginner home brewing, beginner brewer, waterey mead, sweat mead, mead too sour, sour mead, sauer mead

Id: AVXT32ct5a4

Length: 10min 13sec (613 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 10 2022