Crazily sweet maple must

we'ved used EC-1118 in our peach wines @ 1.165. after much massaging, the EC dried out to 1.0 or less. one wine was bone dry (in a good way) and another was fruity/sweet but not cloying. as i say, we had to work that yeast to keep it going. the last batch stalled & needed a turbo yeast jumpstart. so i guess my answer is: maybe/probably and that's soley based on our limited experience. HTH rregards, bobdrob

Sorry -- yes, I meant 1.15.

Should I add more nutrient to the bulk of the must? I'm worried the yeast won't have enough to "eat" in the maple sap.

Also... would you recommend tannins in this?

Matt,

Nutrient in the must is a good idea. Add per the manufacturer's instructions. Aeration is a good idea for any mead, and especially a high gravity must.

Tannins are a matter of taste. I add oak to many of my meads, which contributes some tannin, and I've also used tannin powder on occasion. If you enjoy a tannic red wine, you'll probably enjoy a tannic mead. The tannin can also help to balance the residual sweetness.

Cheers, Ken Taborek

A friend gave me some half-boiled sap to start some maple wine.

Ok, Let's start at the beginning. Finished maple syrup is about 67% sugar.

I use a 1:1 ratio with water giving me 33-34% sugar . SG is 1.125

Use a malic acid tolerant yeast , I use Lavin 71-B .Use a nutrient.

I've found the best way is to heat the whole thing up so it's giving off a bit of steam , Take a bowl of the must and when it's cooled to

90-100F cast in some yeast. Pour the rest of the must into a carboy and sprinkle in some yeast. Don't shake it, don't move it any more than you have to. Let the yeast float on top. Once the bowl of yeast is going gently pour it in and airlock it.

I only make 1 imperial gallon at a time , larger quanities might be harder to work with,

The heat from the must will help the yeast . Don't shake or stir .

I use a dark syrup and after a day or two a distinct line will form, dark on the bottom, straw coloured on the top and the line , over maybe a week , will move down the carboy.

Let it finish on it's own, around 14% will kill off the yeast , Mine takes about 3 months . Super sweet straw coloured dessert wine,

.

You said you wanted to make a sweet mead but that is only part of what you need to decide. You need to decide what you want in terms of alcohol. Do you want to make a mead that will blow the top of your head off after one glass or do you want to have a typical wine level of 11 to 13% or do you want an easy drinking 8-9%. This will definitely effect how you should approach making the mead.

Ray

The yeast'll die off at about 13-14% anyway, no?

I'll keep an eye on it with the hydrometer... if the alcohol content starts wandering higher than 14%, I'll start thinking about killing the yeast. But I have some time to think about it first, right?

Okay: I diluted ridiculously strong (almost syrup) maple sap down to

1.140 SG, added some primed yeast, a bit of yeast nutrient (according to instructions on the container) and things started fermenting. Because the sap was so thick, and I had so much of it, I wound up putting about 20 L of must in a primary, and another 20 L or so in a carboy with lots of head room. Put both next to a oil-filled room heater, so they both are at about 20 degrees Celsius.

This was about eight days ago.

The second or third day after re-starting the maple wine at 1.140 SG, the fermentation was obvious: a yeasty foam was forming on the surface. I'd stir once a day to keep a bit of oxygen in the mix.

Both are still fermenting (I put an airlock on the carboy this morning, just as an experiment), but starting three days ago, on top of both musts there is a thick layer of ... slime. It's the only way I can describe it. It' sort of a rich brown foam on the top, but when I put the stirring spoon in, it goes through a few millimetres of a viscous clear (beige, translucent, not opaque) goo that has the same texture and consistency as what I imagine frog eggs are like. If I stir, it sort of clings to the spoon and "balls up" in the centre on top of of the must, but its natural elasticity spread it right back out again.

It's... uh... gross. But is it bad? Harmful? I've never seen anything like it before, but a quick check of SG showed a drop down to about

1.120, and a quick taste of the sample (taken from sub-slime levels) showed it to be tasty, if somewhat syrupy/slimy. And with a bit of evident alcohol kick already.

What's the slime? Should I be worried?

I don't know what you got but I never stir mine. Just airlock it asap and ignore it.

since the sap was only 1/2 boiled, could it be residual unboiled sugar content with sap impurities forming a cap? just guessing... i know that when we boil sugar for candymaking in school, cheap noname brand x sugars foam considerably more in the process than does domino... aagain, wild speculation on my part. any green mountain state vintners out there with 2 cents to put in?

That's a leading theory at the moment -- I airlocked the one in the carboy (I need another carboy for the one in the primary, but when your main mode of transporation is a bicycle, and the winemaking shops close when you get off work, getting a 23 L glass jar home is a tricky proposition... working on it this week), and when the airlock "boiled over" the slime in it was sticky and sweet. I think it's sediment from the sap (impurities, as you said) "boiling up" to the top of the must and bonding to excess sugar.

Gross, but hopefully not harmful. The carboy version keeps "boiling over" the airlock, but I'm going to carboy the primary one anyway just to keep too many microbes from jumping in. I'm keeping the carboy in the bathtub for easy daily cleanups of the resulting messes.

If I decide to stop fermentation, would an ice bath in the bathtub for a day followed by some sodium biphosphate do the job?

- Matt

Sounds to me like you just got a whole lot of fermenting going on. With high sugar you may have just have hit it right . Too high sugar and the yeast as a hard time . The yeast dies out around 14% so let her go and see what happens after it settles down. What yeast did you use?

Lavlin EC-118. The carboy stuff is less slimy now -- a lot of the "slime" has been lifted out by the bubbling -- and is fermenting like a house on fire. I have a good feeling about this... it's coming out almost coffee-dark, as opposed to last year's "almost white" batch, which lacked both oomph and flavour in the end.

Coffee-dark. That's interesting . Mine starts out the same colour, I just never thought of it that way. A straw colour starts at the top and slowly moves down . Definite line between the colours . Mine always ends up straw coloured but I've never stirred mine so I have no idea what colour I have if I did I use 71-B.

Over a week later and it's still in the same stage: lots of foam in the carboy (and I know it's producing new foam, because I suck the neck clean every morning to keep it from coming up and through the airlock, and it "regrows" during the day), lots of bubbling.

No "line" to speak of; when I suck out the foam it turns into a slightly sweet goo (as originally described). I can't see any form of colour shift. I guess I'm playing the waiting game... any chance of things going "bad" if I just let it work its magic in the carboy with an airlock on?

That sounds like you have too much in the carboy. You can either split the must into 2 containers or reserve some in the fridge and add it later when the foaming subsides.

Pp

You could be right Too much in the carboy.

The high amount of sugar will help preserve the must from any bad guys , Just wondering if it's a bit too warm , maybe a couple of degrees cooler might slow down the yeast and the amount of bubbling.