We are about to make mead (we got near 30 pounds of local honey!). In researching mead-making, different yeasts have different alcohol tolerances … so you make a dry mead by using a yeast with an alcohol tolerance at or above the level your starting gravity would yield if it were fully fermented. A sweeter mead means you have a yeast whose tolerance is lower than that value … the greater the difference, the sweeter the mead. We are going to make a dry mead with Lalvin 71b-1122, a just slightly sweet mead by adding a little more honey but still using Lalvin 71b-1122, and a sweeter mead using Lalvin D-47.<\/p>\n
71b-1122 has a very broad temperature range (59-86 F – and how cool is it that Google returns a yeast profile summary if you search for “71b-1122 temperature range”). D-47 is more particular — a published range of 59-68 F, but reading through homebrew sites has us wanting to stay around 63 degrees. Our sub-grade level is cool, but not that<\/em> cool. Especially as fermentation warms up the fluid.<\/p>\n Scott is developing a home automation controlled fermentation “chamber”. The beer refrigerator is now plugged into a smart outlet. One of the Arduino kits we got has a temperature sensor. We can have a temperature probe monitoring the must and cycle the refrigerator’s power to keep it within a degree or two of our target.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" We are about to make mead (we got near 30 pounds of local honey!). In researching mead-making, different yeasts have different alcohol tolerances … so you make a dry mead by using a yeast with an alcohol tolerance at or above the level your starting gravity would yield if it were fully fermented. A sweeter …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,33],"tags":[21,43,53,44],"class_list":["post-423","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-beer-brewing","category-coding","tag-cooking-2","tag-home-automation","tag-mead","tag-openhab"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/423","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=423"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/423\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":424,"href":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/423\/revisions\/424"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=423"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=423"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=423"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}