with wines, you generally use sorbate (prevent the yeast from being able to reproduce) and sulfite (kills yeast) to prevent refermentation when you back sweeten and then you wait a week or so to make sure it doesn’t start fermenting again before bottling.
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ikidd@lemmy.world 6 days ago
I’ve only every made beers, but when backsweetening, I assume your yeast won’t ferment straight sugar because it’s poisoned out by the alcohol level? Normally if you backsweeten a beer or cider, you need to use lactose that doesn’t work for fermentation.
MuteDog@lemmy.world 5 days ago
poleslav@lemmy.world 5 days ago
It depends! If your yeast is at its max alcohol tolerance you should be able to just use sugar without anything. If it’s not, just like a beer it will referment. As someone that hasn’t done many wines (unless I turn them into brandy Ala half my posts on this community), you can use different stabilizing chemicals before back sweetening (they’ll also work on beer too). Personally I’ve wanted to try very low temp pasteurization on beers or wines I make for my significant other to try back sweetening, any method should work! (Though personally I tend to kill off my yeast with high abvs since I primarily distill these days)
MuteDog@lemmy.world 5 days ago
if you’re kegging the beers and are going to keep the keg cold for the entire time, you can probably just sweeten the beer without pasteurizing or sorbating, the residual yeast in the beer is probably not going to be very active at fridge temps (though I have had some wild yeasts keep on fermenting stuff in the fridge).
Alternatively you can also mash hotter to produce a wort with fewer fermentable sugars which will result in a sweeter finished beer, you can also reduce the bitterness of your hopping to swing the balance of the beer flavor towards the sweeter side of things.
I’d try all of that before attempting to low temp pasteurize your beer.
poleslav@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Oh I’m aware, I’ve been brewing beer for 8 years or so, the pasteurization is just something I wanna try for fun lol