honey wine wonn´t stop fermenting!

[jen]

I have been waiting some time for my honey wine to stop fermenting...3months actually.We thought it had stopped so we bottled it,but when we opened a bottle it erupted from the bottom of the bottle and went cloudy and fizzy.Can Anyone tell me what is going on?

[Tim Hall]

This is not at all unusual, especially with wild yeasts which may not eat up the sugars as quickly as laboratory-cultured yeasts bred for high alcohol tolerances. Even with pedigreed yeast it often takes around 6 months to have a mead that's ready to bottle.

As the amount of fermentable sugar in your must drops and the alcohol content rises, the environment becomes increasingly inhospitable to the yeasts. Fewer and fewer yeasts can tolerate the conditions the more adverse they become, and activity may become barely perceptible. It's best to wait until your mead has become clear before you bottle it. Once your mead is completely clear it's safe to assume all fermentation has stopped.

When you went to bottle your mead, you probably gave your yeast some fresh oxygen, giving them a little boost to get working again. You should be aware that the amount of pressure that can build up in your bottles can be very dangerous...put those bottles in a very cold fridge to stop the fermentation or throw a big party ASAP.

[tmark]

on a related note, I just bottled my mead today and put on the air lock. The air lock I purchased came with a small cap. Should the cap be on or off?

[Tim Hall]

If I understand you correctly, yes you should put the cap over the airlock. There are two common types of airlocks, both have caps to prevent dust from settling in the "locking" fluid, and prevent it from evaporating too quickly. The caps are designed to allow gas to escape (one type is perforated, the other does not fully seat on rim of the airlock), if that's your reasoning for omitting the cap.

[jonedoright]

Wow! After reading this post I went and checked a some mead that I had bottled in a bail-top bottle and it sprayed everywhere. I don't have a regular air lock so i just use balloons. I had let this bottle go unsealed until the balloon stopped inflating. (I would let it inflate and then let the gas out then let it re-inflate, over and over.) But I guess it wasn't done yet. This mead was about a month old.

[ashl]

This is why racking is a good idea--pouring the fermenting mead from one vessel into a clean one. It aerates the mead, gets rid of everything that's settled on the bottom, and restarts the fermentation. I usually rack three times (month one and rack, month two and rack, month three and rack), then let it age three months in the carboy before bottling. It also improves flavor tremendously.

[Brewer Pete]

Honey musts are devoid in FAN free amino nitrates and their pH levels can be rather hostile to yeasts. This leads to long fermentation times and then rather long secondary and long bottling/aging times to get meads to become show stoppers in taste and quality. Beer worts in contrast are perfect yeast environments with all that boiled grain goodness in the water. Ciders are more like meads in being poor environments for yeast. Grapes are more like beer worts in being higher in essential nutrients for yeasts.

If you are doing a standard mead without any more modern techniques and additives such as outlined in the compleat meadmaker book, online web forums like gotmead, or websites of long time mead people like Michael (home.comcast.net/~mzapx1/) then expect fermentations that could take up to 9 months to complete. Usually you will rack to a secondary fermenter off the lees (fallen yeasts, etc at bottom of bottle) and then again have to keep re-racking again to a new bottle to keep racking the mead off the lees.

Modern techniques build up the honey must with additions such as DAP (diammonium phosphate) and compleat micronutrient powders such as Fermaid-K or Red Star's SuperFood. Then getting the pH dialed in to around 3.9-4.0 and some amazing interesting oxygenation techniques (power drills with stirrer attachments - generating tons of foam) you whisk the buggary out of the honey must.

Fermentation times can be brought down in the most optimum 5-7 days! Still with racking and aging you are looking at about a 6 month investment.

If you want a quick and simple yet tasty when young mead to drink (although a bit sweet for some.) Then try the JAO, Joes Ancient Orange recipe (http://www.gotmead.com/forum/showthread.php?t=6885). Its just a gallon of mead recipe that has been designed and balanced around of all things, fleischmanns bakers yeast from the supermarket. If you are living in the states then you should give it a go. I have two of them going at the moment although I'm not in the states. They are at the 1 1/2 month mark so too early to tell.

I've just added a 60 liter (about 16 US Gallons) primary fermenter to handle all the foaming during modern fermentation and will be racking to 34 liter (about 9 US Gallons) secondaries so I'm a bit more into meads :) Still will brew the odd beer or two.

To stop a fermentation, its a bit late if you are already in the bottle. But normally if you want to stop a fermentation in the secondary when you measure the specific gravity (hydrometer, or a refractometer with alcohol corrections applied) and find you are as sweet as you want it to be you can stop the fermentation. Or if you go too dry, stop the fermentation and then back sweeten and bottle.

Stopping the fermentation means no more yeast power so you won't be able to carbonate in the bottle if making a natural champagne style dry mead. This means kegs and carbonating in the keg by forcing CO2 from a gas cylinder or just drinking it still and uncarbonated like wine.

Potassium Sorbate will turn of the gene in yeasts to have sex :) so kind of like sterilization. It technically does not actively stop fermentation so you also need or alternative use other products like Sodium Bisulfite or Campden Tablets. Be aware that the later add sulfites so if you are one in 10000 people who are allergic to sulfites then you will pretty much end up drinking dry mead.

In traditional brewing, fermentation is completed not by airlock activity, or other sign, only when the specific gravity reading is the same value without decreasing (still fermenting into more alcohol) for 3 consecutive days (beers) with mead it would still be the same concept but readings further apart time wise. Again using hydrometer or a refractometer with the readings corrected for alcohol in the must skew factor.

Now if you want sweet and are allergic then you just learn a little bit more about tools such as refractometers and how fermentation works. You pick a yeast that has an ABV of for example 14% so you know that by 14% alcohol by volume the yeasts will run out of puff and give up. If you know that then you can calculate how much honey to add until you reach a specific Starting Gravity reading (hyrdometer, or Brix Refractometer). Once you have the starting gravity dialed in you subtract the alcohol 14% attenuation factor and you look at the end result. If the result is under 1 then you are very dry, if its above 1 then its sweet to some degree, the higher the number the sweeter. So you keep adding more honey to get a SG that when you subtract the 14% ABV attenuation factor = some number above 1 for gravity reading where you know the sweetness is dialed in just perfect for your taste.

Then bottle, wait, and enjoy nectar of the gods in a good 6+ months aging.

P.S. If you get into mead there are so many variations and ingredients you can throw in you'll have more variety of what you can make with simple honey musts than you do in the wine industry for example.

I use a refractometer model RHB 32 ATC. It sold locally for close to $150! so I bought it on eBay from Hong Kong since the factory is in China I went close to the source. I got the same exact model unit for $26 after converting currency from the listed british pounds (in US Dollars that would be close to $17).

I also went to dealextreme and got digital scales, a pocket model accurate to .1 grams that measures up to 1 kilogram $10 including shipping to here. And a kitchen model accurate to the gram and measures up to 3 kilograms for $16 including shipping to here. A push of a single button and they read ounces and pounds for those still in America. You can get kitted out in all the advanced toys of brewing for very cheap today since everything is made in China no matter what store and price tag you agree to pay, same units :)