The books / Mead Making / chapter 9 of 21
The cellar through the year
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
The ground is a slow thermometer. The year's swing in temperature shrinks with depth and arrives later, so a cellar is cooler than the air in summer, warmer in winter, and its warmest weeks come after midsummer rather than on it.
A ferment also makes its own heat. A wine must commonly runs 5 to 8 C above its room; a small vessel sheds heat faster, but still runs warm.
Together they decide the yeast: one with a narrow range belongs to the months that fit it.
In this cellar the year runs from about 10 C in February to 19 or 20 from July to September, and a ferment adds 3. D47 pitched from Jun 29 to Oct 6 runs hot, and D47 or 71B pitched from Dec 21 to Apr 15 sticks.