First mead finished too sweet

[acidrain]

I brewed my first mead just about 6 mo ago.
12 lbs Costco honey
5 gallon batch
Fermaid K and Tannin added per recipe
Wyeast 4632
OG 1.095
Cold crashed and racked to secondary about 2 mo in.
FG 1.015
FG hasn't moved in 4 mo's.

Now I'm ready to bottle, and I'm wondering if I should re-introduce some yeast to get the FG down a bit more. It's too sweet for my taste. I'm a noob... a little help?

 

[fatbloke]

Well I can't recall which yeast that is and an 80 point drop is somewhere in the 10 to 11 % ABV area (smartphones are a pain for multiple windows and checking stuff while answering), but if the 1.015 is too sweet for your palate, rather than faffing about with trying to restart ferments etc, either drop the gravity with some vodka (but the downside is loss of body/viscosity) or balance the sweetness a bit with acid - given the honey only flavouring, a mix of 2 parts malic and 1 part tartaric, added in increments, which should be well dissolved and carefully/gently mixed in. If you have a pH meter you could add to numbers, but adding to taste is equally effective......

Don't forget, its mead not beer, so its age is still quite young. If you get near to where your taste tells you its near acceptable, just age it from there.

Oh and the acid suggestion would likely render it below 3.0 pH and unlikely to be an issue in bottles.......

 

[acidrain]

Fatbloke, thanks for the reply. The yeast is supposed to be a dry mead yeast, so I expected it to be able to ferment well into the teens, but like I said... first timer.
Thanks for the acid idea. I do intend to bottle age it further. The plan is to have a summer solstice party with it in late June, but I would like to free up my carboy.

 

[bernardsmith]

I wonder if your cold crashing and racking removed the viable yeast. I see that this yeast should be able to tolerate up to about 18 percent ABV.
I would have allowed the mead to remain in the primary until the gravity dropped right down to 1.000 or lower. If it appeared to have stopped fermenting I wonder if the yeast needed more DAP or if the pH had dropped too low. If you check these parameters and they are OK then what you might do is rehydrate some more of the yeast and slowly introduce the mead to this yeast colony doubling the volume every few hours until the yeast has been acclimated to the alcohol level in your mead. (ie treating this as a stalled fermentation).

 

[acidrain]

Exactly what I was wondering... After cold crashing I worried that I had jumped the gun even though the fermentation appeared to have stopped.
I don't have a (working) PH meter... test it with strips?
What is the outside range of the yeast?
If it's outside the range, just live with it?
Thanks!