The books / Mead Making / chapter 10 of 21
Three steady readings
All chapters
- Honey, water and yeast
- Why mead goes wrong
- Never boil the must
- Honey and gravity
- The alcohol is the gravity you lost
- Choosing a yeast
- Feed it in thirds
- Sanitise everything it touches
- The cellar through the year
- Three steady readings
- Racking off the lees
- Faults and what caused them
- A stuck ferment and the restart
- Clearing, fining and the second racking
- Stabilise before you sweeten
- Dry, semi-sweet and sweet
- Bottling
- Varietal meads
- Patience is a technique
- Selling mead, and the licence
- What the cellar leaves out
A quiet airlock is not a measurement. A mead bottled while its yeast is still working through the last sugar keeps fermenting in the glass, with nowhere for the gas to go.
So a meadmaker trusts the hydrometer instead. Fermentation is finished when the gravity reads the same three times running, a few days apart, and sits at or near where that yeast and style should end. For a strong, slow must a full week between readings is safer.
Only then is it racked, and only then is it safe to think about sweetening or bottling.
In this game the cellar takes the readings for you, three days apart from the day primary ends, and the third matching reading marks the batch "Ferment done". The gravity chart shows the three dots.