A community dedicated to homebrewing beer, mead, wine, cider and everything in between. If it ferments, bring it over here.
Share recipes, ideas, ask for feedback or just advice.
Some starting points for beginners:
Quick and diry guide to fermenting fruit - cider and wine
You've already hit on the best use. It'll replace honey or sugar in glazes, easy peasy.
Secondary to that, as a mixer in sweet cocktails.
Beyond that, it can be cooked down into a syrup and used as such.
Mind you, I only ever tried making mead once, and it was agea ago, and at far smaller quantities. Not sure how well it'll store at that abv, but it can be frozen in ice cube trays. Well, the stuff I had could.
add yeast nutrient and more yeast
Tried and didn't get far. I do wonder what type of sugars it has, it was the cheapest Lidl honey I could get. So not sure on the quality of the honey. Also used quite a lot of it. IIRC the previous batch that fermented dry in a couple of weeks or so was targeting 7.5% and this was 15%. So that is also a likely reason for it.
Want to try an apple mead again, but sweeten it a little after it's finished. Maybe berry meads too. Seems to ferment a lot easier which is also a benefit.
the cheapest Lidl honey
Yeah, that was probably high fructose corn syrup....
Could be, or at least blended with it. The previous batch at a lower target ABV did work with the same Lidl own brand of honey but each batch they sell could be different too, or HFCS still ferments up to a point.
Either way its a lesson for next brew, just a matter of what to do with all I have left.
there is a huge worldwide problem at the moment with honey and bees in general, so I can pretty much guarantee that was not pure honey.
never did mead but from what i know issues might be high osmotic stress and low nutrients. I'd dilute a sample to about 16 brix, not higher, maybe lower, add nutrients and yeast and try to restart the fermentation. if you really want to get that high an abv add the undiluted stuff in batches after a couple of days. this way the osmotic stress is at a minimum.
Use it for back sweetening other mead?
Certainly sweetening other drinks seems like an idea. Maybe more as a mixer than to back sweeten though.
Sorry, I don't have useful suggestions, I'm just curious — what does stalled mean, and how does it happen? I made mead many moons ago and I don't remember the term from back then, so I'm wondering if I just got lucky
The ferment "stalled". No activity. No bubbles. No increase in ethanol. Gravity stuck.
He added way too much sugar (honey), probably.
Yeah too much sugar at once is the likely cause of it.
Next ferment probably going to be cider. Let the yeast recover a bit.
A wine yeast would probably manage to survive. It would be strong.