The books / Mead Making / chapter 13 of 21
A stuck ferment and the restart
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 stuck ferment is gravity that stops falling well above where it should end, and stays there. The yeast has quit: starved, chilled, overheated or poisoned by more alcohol than it can take.
The rescue is to give it better conditions and a stronger yeast:
- Rouse the lees.
- Bring the must into the new yeast's range.
- Add nutrient.
- Pitch a high-tolerance strain such as EC-1118 or K1V, acclimatised first so it meets the alcohol gradually rather than all at once.
The other honest answer is to accept a sweeter, lower-strength mead than you planned.
Either way, a stuck batch still holds sugar yeast could eat, which matters when it is bottled.
In this game a stuck batch waits, unchanged, as long as you like.