Dealing with the acid in honey

[Microscopist]

My first year of bee keeping coming to a close and I have buckets of honey to play with. I like fermenting my beers out very dry and like the aromatic aroma that the honey adds when the sugar's been taken away.

The trouble is, honey has a pH around 3.9 and using largish proportions in a brew ( one kilo to 12l ) adds a shedload of gluconic acid so the beers have an acid tang to them.

That's great for my saisons but it throws other styles a bit off balance. I know from the lab that calcium gluconate tastes damned chalky so I'm wondering if would be noticeable in beer if I used calcium carbonate or whether I'd be better off using something else - I've potassium and ammonium carbonates to hand and I know yeast will happily use ammonium ions up.

 

[Homercidal]

Hmm... I haven't noticed the meads I've made having too much acidity. (Except this last one, for some reason). And my meads have a LOT of honey in them...

 

[Microscopist]

It works in meads fine - I've done meads with nothing but honey but the beers do have a slight sharpness to them, they're good but might be even better if I tempered it a little. I might experiment with chalk in the glass as a tentative experiment.

 

[Homercidal]

I think, IIRC, Calcium Carbonate doesn't readily dissolve into water, but it might work fine in a more acidic solution like beer. This might be a good question to put forth in the WINE forum. I think those guys work with acidity after fermentation all the time.

 

[Grantman1]

I have nothing valuable to offer here, since the most honey I've ever brewed with at a time was 1lb, but I just wanted to say that it's awesome that you are beekeeping.

 

[pythonaut]

Hmm. Have you seen the BOMM? It's a quick-mead recipe that uses some portion of potassium carbonate to offset the acidity of the honey. I've made a few batches and haven't noticed any weird flavors from the addition.

 

[Microscopist]

Oooh, I shall try that, thanks for tip!