by brantoken » Mon Mar 17, 2014 12:25 pm

I can tell you I have had no end of trouble trying to making honey shine. Honey ferments take forever , are slow and are easy to stall. What I found that did the trick was adding some malt syrup. 5lb to a batch of about 15lbs honey. IT worked great, cooked off in a couple of weeks goes off like a bomb compared the to other honey fermentation I have done.



I have made mead in the past, as it does take forever in some cases.

Yeast are fussy with honey, it has some natural anti fungal properties.

Honey shine is great , but if you don't add enough nutrients to start, it goes real slow. Sometimes it still goes bad anyway.

the longer it sits the more of a chance it has to go bad.



I added the malt for a couple of reasons, Never found a yeast yet that didn't like malt syrup. I have read that DAP can cause formation of Ethyl carbamate ( urethane) , especially if you use too much . Don't know if it is true, I am not a chemist but I didn't like the idea of it. Scotch is very high in ethyl carbonate and It does make me feel lousy when I drink the stuff that has the higher amounts. EU requires distillers to disclose amounts of Ethyl carbamate and is on line if you care to look. Not saying I haven't used dap, Like a lot of things more may not always be better.



I did 50 lbs of honey one year to distill, I did it in three batches. All three batches eventually went bad, I did add appropriate amounts of nuetrants, dap etc. It is just a kick in the ass to wait for 6 months to a year do all that darned work only to get some spoil crap. It is a risky business. Oh I distilled it anyway and it still tasted horrible. I am sure results may vary.



I like it better with the malt extract. I will not try it again any other way, it's too much trouble. The malt does add some very nice flavors, if you don't like malt taste use the lighter extracts. It is possible to keep the malts contribution low. I still haven't found the ideal amount of malt to add as of yet, Try less to get less flavor impact.

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