Pyment - Mead Day 2011

Pyment

Ingredients for 5 U.S. gallons (19 liters)

For pyment, you can use a couple of variants. The first uses grape juice and water plus honey. The second uses just grape juice and honey. The latter will provide more grape character since you are not diluting the juice, but you are also going to end up with a sack-strength mead with a fair amount of alcohol. With the first technique, you can produce a lower OG and even get a hydromel-type pyment. Given that most wine grape juice is in the range of 1.095 OG, unless you add a lot of water along with the honey, the final must OG is going to be fairly high. The recipe here doesn't add any water to the must.

• 12.0 lb (5.4 kg) orange blossom honey
• 4.25 gallons (16 L) Gewürztraminer juice
• 1 tsp. Fermaid K
• 2 tsp. diammonium phosphate
• 1 packet Lalvin 71B-1122 yeast or Lallemand 58W3 yeast
• GoFerm for rehydration

Original Gravity: 1.146

This will result in a medium sweet pyment, Gewürztraminer grapes tend to taste slightly sweet even when fermented dry. If you are using juice from a wine kit, consider using the whole kit and increasing the honey slightly to reach the target OG with the slightly large batch size the kit will produce.

Directions

Pour the honey into a large plastic fermenter. Start adding grape juice to the fermenter. After just a couple gallons, start stirring the mixture. Once you have a couple gallons of juice and the honey mixed together, place a sanitized hydrometer in the must. Slowly add juice and mix after each addition until you hit the target OG. Add 0.25 teaspoons of Fermaid K and 0.5 teaspoons of diammonium phosphate to the fermenter.

Rehydrate the yeast in GoFerm, following the package directions. Once rehydration has finished, mix the rehydrated yeast and liquid into the fermenter.

Once or twice a day, stir the must. The stirring process will release a lot of CO2 from the must. Stir until almost no more bubbles are released by additional stirring. If doing the stirring with a spoon, it will take a while to drive out all the CO2. Using a wand in the drill is faster, but be careful not to release so much CO2 so fast that the fermenter foams over the top.

Once a day, after a round of stirring, add the dose of nutrients, 0.25 teaspoons of Fermaid K and 0.5 teaspoons of diammonium phosphate. Do this for 3 days.

After three to four weeks, rack the mead into glass and wait for it to drop clear. You can use Super-Kleer K.C. to help the clarification if the mead has finished fermenting. Once clear, keg and carbonate to around 3 volumes of CO2.