Charlottesville Area Masters of Real Ale

Hi, all.

I just started fermenting my first batch of mead, and we're really excited.  According to the recipe I used, we added a few pounds of 'corn syrup' purchased from a local grocery store.  As we were cleaning up after pitching the yeast, we noticed on the back of the bottle that the 'corn syrup' was mostly high fructose corn syrup.  Does anybody know if yeast can consume high fructose corn syrup?  If not, I guess it's dump and brew again, because I sure don't want a mead that's sweetened - certainly not in those proportions.  Any advice or shared experience would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Eric

Tom is probably the best source for mead info in CAMRA.

I'm pretty sure that corn syrup is highly fermentable (like honey), but I don't know what flavors, good or bad, will come from from it.

 

I usually just use honey and fruit in my melomels, along with some yeast nutrient and white wine yeast.  I am not sure about the corn syrup, but if it consists of simple sugars, then yeast can consume it.  When I see corn sugar in a recipe, it is usually to help dry the beer/mead/wine out by replacing some of the more complicated sugar molecules with simple sugars, which yeast ferment much easier.  It helps bring the final gravity down and is very common in brewing Belgian beer.  I have never seen it in a mead recipe.  Usually, if you want to make a drier finished mead, like a dry table mead, then you would just use less honey.  I have found that 15 pounds of honey leads to a relatively dry mead, where as 20 pounds gives you more of a desert mead (20 pounds plus 10 pounds of fruit is what I usually do).

Hope that helps.