Last fermenter is about to be empty. This one is my blue razz jolly rancher. Smells amazing. Tastes terrible (without back sweetening) Came out at 11.8% abv. Back sweetening with simple syrup down to 8.5% seems to be the winning combo, if I were drinking it as a wine: smells much stronger than it tastes of the delicious artificial blue razz flavor. Over all a fun YOLO project. Guess we’ll see how it tastes as a spirit in the next few hours + 24 hours for the angels to have their share. Now to determine what to make next… I’m thinking of trying pressure fermenting in the keg for my beer, a wine for my girlfriend, and the third fermenter for whatever meme spirit I feel like whipping up next, which I haven’t the slightest clue of what I’m in the mood for yet.
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.
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)
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.
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
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.