I have done a bit of reading about stabilization and back sweetening and here is a little summary of the best texts I have found. Again most articles are from US so everything is in gallons and fractions of tee spoons (when will they ever realize the benefits of the metric system... :o) )
1) E. C. Kraus
On this page there is a link to articles about wine making. Here you can find plenty of good reading, but scrolling down the page you get to "How to stop a fermentation" (see HERE). But the article does not say anything about how much metabisulfite and sorbate to use.
2) Monkey Boy Mead
This is yet another mead nut whose texts I enjoy reading. He is very enthusiastic. His catagory "meadmaking 101" contains several good articles. One of these is "Ending Fermentation & Aging" which you will find HERE. Here is also a description of back sweetening.
4) Got Mead Forum
...of cause... The forum never lets me down :o). Here I found a great thread. about stopping fermentations HERE. The reply from Wayne (wayneb) is quite good. I am not a member, so I unfortunately I cannot follow his link.
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Update:
3) Brew and Wine Hobby
From a google search I found a blog topic describing Sulfite vs. Sorbate. Unfortunately the page has been removed.
onsdag den 1. januar 2014
Recipe 2: Sack mead (continued 4) - Still bubbling...
The day after I did the stabilization and added metabisulfite and sorbate the mead is still fermenting. The extra honey was just too delicious for the yeast cells :o)
So fortunately we have a quite mild winter so far, so I put the fermenter outside on the balcony. Cooling the fermenter to below 5C should do the trick I guessed.
The thermometer says about 3C when measuring the the temperature of the wall
Today the mead has been outside for 2 days AND IT IS STILL BUBBLING. How is that possible???????
So fortunately we have a quite mild winter so far, so I put the fermenter outside on the balcony. Cooling the fermenter to below 5C should do the trick I guessed.
The thermometer says about 3C when measuring the the temperature of the wall
Today the mead has been outside for 2 days AND IT IS STILL BUBBLING. How is that possible???????
Recipe 2: Sack mead (continued 3) - Stabilization
So it was time to do something with my Sack mead. It has just been taking care of itself for the past month doing a little bubbling during the day but nothing much. My other meads have stopped entirely any fermenting activity, so I will try to stop this one too.
When I opened the fermenter the smell is very pleasant. The taste is still quite acidic and it was still possible to taste some sweetness.
The density was measured to 1.010 which was great - right on the initial target. But as put in an earlier post, I should probably go for a bit heavier mead, i.e. a target of 1.015 instead.
Then I measured pH to somewhere between 3 and 4 with pH strips, so lets just say 3.5.
There was plenty of yeast at the bottom of the fermenter, but the fermetation is going on so slowly that it had already started to clear. I tried the best I could to transfer the mead to a new fermenter without disturbing the yeast layer. Of cause the siphon slips so I had to stop a bit earlier than I wanted since the goal is get rid of old yeast. So now there was only a bit more than 18 L left of the batch
So now that the target had been passed I tried to back sweeten the mead to 1.015. Since I initially used 7200g honey and got a density of 1.120 this means than 100 g should increase the density by 0.0017. So adding 300 g should raise the density by 0.005 in a 20 L batch. So for an ~18,5 L batch (after honey addition) the increase in density should be about 0.0054.
I weighed out about 300 g of honey and mixed it with 0.5 L of the must and started stirring. Now, dissolving honey in hot water is no problem but in an almost finished mead at room temperature it takes much much longer, but with a bit of patience and a lot of stirring it finally dissolved. The solution was then added to the fermenter and the content was stirred well before measuring the denstity again: 1.015 - spot on.
I had purchased a yeast stop pre-mixed package, which I added to the mead. When it comes to stopping a fermentation two ingredients are used.
1) metabisulfite
2) sorbate
The package I used contained the food additives E223 which is sodium metabisulfite. This also exist as a potassium salt which would be the more ideal additive so that you don't have to add sodium. Metabisulfite is the yeast killer. For 100 ppm about 2 g of K-Meta should be added. When the same amount of Na-Meta is added, then 17% more Meta is actually added due to the difference in molecular weight
Some yeast cells will survive the use of metabisulfite at the relatively low levels added (max 300 ppm) to avoid the distinct taste of sulphur, so sorbate is added to prevent the cells from budding. In this manner no new yeast cells can be generated. This is the stabilization part. The package I used contained potassium sorbate which would be the ideal salt. I can only find a recommended volume/gallon to be added: ½TSP per gallon so 2.5 TSP for 19 L but without a clue to the density of the powder it does not say much.
Now why the hell does the package not state what the mixing ratio of the two components is? I called the shop where I bought the package and they would forward my request when the factory when it opened the 6th of January. The total content of the package is 7 g so my best guess is that I added 2 g of Na-Meta and 5 g of K-Sorbate
The density was measured to 1.010 which was great - right on the initial target. But as put in an earlier post, I should probably go for a bit heavier mead, i.e. a target of 1.015 instead.
Then I measured pH to somewhere between 3 and 4 with pH strips, so lets just say 3.5.
There was plenty of yeast at the bottom of the fermenter, but the fermetation is going on so slowly that it had already started to clear. I tried the best I could to transfer the mead to a new fermenter without disturbing the yeast layer. Of cause the siphon slips so I had to stop a bit earlier than I wanted since the goal is get rid of old yeast. So now there was only a bit more than 18 L left of the batch
So now that the target had been passed I tried to back sweeten the mead to 1.015. Since I initially used 7200g honey and got a density of 1.120 this means than 100 g should increase the density by 0.0017. So adding 300 g should raise the density by 0.005 in a 20 L batch. So for an ~18,5 L batch (after honey addition) the increase in density should be about 0.0054.
I weighed out about 300 g of honey and mixed it with 0.5 L of the must and started stirring. Now, dissolving honey in hot water is no problem but in an almost finished mead at room temperature it takes much much longer, but with a bit of patience and a lot of stirring it finally dissolved. The solution was then added to the fermenter and the content was stirred well before measuring the denstity again: 1.015 - spot on.
I had purchased a yeast stop pre-mixed package, which I added to the mead. When it comes to stopping a fermentation two ingredients are used.
1) metabisulfite
2) sorbate
The package I used contained the food additives E223 which is sodium metabisulfite. This also exist as a potassium salt which would be the more ideal additive so that you don't have to add sodium. Metabisulfite is the yeast killer. For 100 ppm about 2 g of K-Meta should be added. When the same amount of Na-Meta is added, then 17% more Meta is actually added due to the difference in molecular weight
Some yeast cells will survive the use of metabisulfite at the relatively low levels added (max 300 ppm) to avoid the distinct taste of sulphur, so sorbate is added to prevent the cells from budding. In this manner no new yeast cells can be generated. This is the stabilization part. The package I used contained potassium sorbate which would be the ideal salt. I can only find a recommended volume/gallon to be added: ½TSP per gallon so 2.5 TSP for 19 L but without a clue to the density of the powder it does not say much.
Now why the hell does the package not state what the mixing ratio of the two components is? I called the shop where I bought the package and they would forward my request when the factory when it opened the 6th of January. The total content of the package is 7 g so my best guess is that I added 2 g of Na-Meta and 5 g of K-Sorbate
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