How to CARBONATE and SWEETEN your mead, cider, beer, and wine

Meads are sometimes best enjoyed carbonated. This especially applies to session meads like hydromels. But what if you want your drink to be sweet and also carbonated? Doing it wrong can lead to exploding bottles. There are several methods for how to bottle condition and back sweeten your beverages, and we're showing a few here. We hope this helps you on your journey to sweeten and carbonate your meads, ciders, and wines!

What are you carbonating? Let us know in the comments!

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[djtomchay]

Used a sous vide to pasteurize my cider once. Crazy easy. Juat set it to 142 degrees, set a thermometer in a bottle of water in with the capped bottles and when it hit 140, I just left them.in for 20 minutes. Easy peasy

[doghugger]

A little late to the party, but for those of you having difficulty dissolving erythritol in your brew/fermentation, put the erythritol in your blender/nutribullet/food processor first and grind it into a fine powder, then add it to your brew/fermentation.

[leocarlsson]

Almost scary. I'm making my first mead, and was looking for ways to back sweeten and bottle carbonate, and found your channel today. Then, a few hours later, you post this! Almost scary, but very useful! Just gotta find a way to buy Erythritol in Sweden, thanks!

[royharkins]

When pasteurising did you have the tops on or off, brilliant information thank you and bottoms up 😊

[alexthomas]

This is the video I've been waiting for hope everything is going well since the er visit

[noest-onge]

Hey I'm reaching out to you since you're my main ref for my brew projects. I've been looking around and can't find the info. I'm reusing random champagne bottles that I collect wash and sanitize for bottling cider and mead. I'm wondering if the thinner ones are strong enough for standard bottle conditioning. I tried to find some kind of table comparing glass thickness and conditioning sugar amout but I found nothing. Maybe I don't search with the right keywords ?
Thanks!

[PeterHollingshead]

I like my brews to be a little on the dry side, and depending on the brew, 30-40g erythritol per gallon will take the dry edge off a .994 ish FG brew without being "sweet". I've noticed a cooling sensation with too much erythritol. As always, thanks for the vid! Cheers!

[danssv]

Witch places sell that sugar you talking about as I want to back sweeten my gingerbeer, thanks

[AdamWilson]

Great video. So I have a query, I've got a Cherry Mead which is ready to bottle. I've used potassium sorbate now, as it went a hair past the sweetness I wanted. It looked there like you backsweetened and primed at the same time (5:38)? Is that not all just sweetening? Should I backsweeten first, wait a week, and then prime? Or do what you did considering I've killed the yeast now?

[giusax]

Have you ever had problems with erythritol crystallizing? I added it to a traditional mead and it just won't dissolve. It does initially but then it re-crystallizes as though no stirring happened, and the mead looks really weird now (it's got small lumps in suspension all over and a bunch at the bottom)...

[jms]

Will this work for ginger beer? My ginger beer is very actively fermenting. I was thinking of letting it just finish and then doing what you describe.

[eandersontalent]

Question, I have a corn allergy and cannot backsweeten with sugar alcohols, and don't have a kegging system...yet. What I was thinking of doing, as a novice homebrewer, was making mead like I regularly do, siphoning to secondary, carbonating with a fermentable sugar, and then after a couple of weeks stabilizing and clarifying, but I didn't know if this would affect the CO2 levels. Would love your input. Thank you so much!

[conradwheeler]

Yeast selection might be another good topic... so many people get stuck on doing EC1118 for everything or D47 without consideration for temperatures.

I suppose you could include TOSNA and other things like step feeding, tannin, opti-red, fermaid/DAP, yeast rehydration, etc

[MadBearAngler]

Noob question.

What if I already got my desired sweetness, Do I still need to backsweet AND add the Dextrose to fizz?

Thank you.

[knacrr]

Are there problems adding erythritol at the beginning of the fermentation? As all the other sugars...

[williampennjr.]

Can you naturally carbonate your brew after you stabilized it. I like to add potassium metabisulfite to prevent spoilage.

[Noble]

Hello I am at the point where my wine is complete and ready to be bottled. I would like to add carbonation to it to make a Champagne style wine. How should I go about this?

[deathspade]

What if my brew has already reached the yeast tolerance? Is it too late to carbonate, or is there a way to carbonate it after its hit its tolerance

[millershakell]

Hey man quick question? You didn't quite specify but when you pasturize does the water in your pot have to be level with the cider in your bottle ? Or can it be below that level ? Cheers

[SSmith-enwq]

Always great to learn new things about brewing. Thank you for the great content as But, I sure am glad I splurged on a keg system. This kind of stuff makes my head spin and I haven’t even had a drink 😝👍🏼