Formulating A Pyment

How do you develop a recipe for a pyment when using wine grape juice as one of the ingredients? My approach to pyments is much like my approach to making other melomels (fruit meads), the fruit is co-fermented with the honey. That means the grape juice is mixed into the must along with the honey at the start.

For this posting we will assume that the grape juice we are using has a specific gravity of 1.095 and that we want to make 7 gallons of a pyment must that has a starting specific gravity of 1.136.

Just Add Some Honey

Using those numbers above, here is one approach. Just add honey to the grape juice to get to the target starting gravity by subtracting the juice specific gravity points from the specific gravity points of the target. That means 136 – 95 or 41 specific gravity point or 1.041. Now we need to determine how much honey is required to make 7 gallons of honey must with a specific gravity of 1.041. The amount of honey needed is 4.6 pounds. Starting with a few gallons of grape juice in the fermenter add the honey and stir until well dissolved and then top up to 7 gallons with additional juice.

The disadvantage of this approach is that the percentage of fermentables from honey is fairly low, approximately 30% of the fermentables are from honey. The percentage is calculated as 41 / 136. However, the wine character will be most intense in this formulation as the grapes are providing around 70% of the fermentable sugars. Sometimes the varietal grape character is what you want to emphasize. If that is the case just adding honey is what you want to do.

I’ve made a lot of medal winning pyments with this approach but what if you want to get more honey character into your pyment so as to emphasize the honey character. To do so you will need to increase the percentage of the fermentable sugars that come from the honey.

Getting More Honey Character

To get significant honey character we want to have more than 50% of the fermentable sugar come from the honey. To do that we do have to basically water down the grape juice so that we need more specific gravity points from the honey to hit our target original gravity..

Pearson’s Square Background

Pearson’s square is a tool frequently used during blending of two ingredients when you need to determine the ratio of the ingredients needed to hit a desired target.

A		D
	C
B		E

The values in the square are:

A: is the value of the property of ingredient #1
B: is the value of the property of ingredient #2
C: the desired value of the property in the blend of #1 and #2
D: calculated parts of ingredient #1 (C-B)
E: calculated parts of ingredient #2 (A-C)

There are several consideration that need to be met for the Pearsonś square to work.

• The value of C must be between the values of A and B.
• Disregard negative numbers on the right side, just use the absolute value, i.e., just remove the minus sign.

For formulating our pyment, we will use specific gravity points as the property in our Pearsonś square.

The Numbers For This Pyment

I am going to use a yeast that has a 16% alcohol tolerance and I want the mead to finish with a moderate residual sweetness so I want the original gravity of the pyment to be around 1.136. I will do the calculations assuming I am making a must of the honey and water with a specific gravity of 1.170.

To keep things simple we will just use the specific gravity points in the Pearsonś square. Specific gravity points are the calculated as:

1000 * (SG – 1)

For example, the specific gravity points for a specific gravity of 1.170 is just 170. With the numbers filled in and D and E calculated we have the following.

170		41
	136
95		34

That tells us that using a honey must with an SG of 1.170 and a grape juice with a SG of 1.095 we can blend 41 parts of the honey must with 34 parts of the grape juice and we will have a mixture with a specific gravity of 1.136.

The numbers say we will get approximately 68% of the fermentables in the pyment from the honey.

• 651 points from honey (3.83 * 170)
• 301 points from grape juice (3.17 * 95)

68.4% = 100 * (651 / (651 + 301))

Converting Ratios To Amounts

There are a total of 75 parts in the blend; 41 + 34 is 75. Since we want to make 7 gallons of the pyment, 75 parts has to total up as 7 gallons. That means each part of the blend represents seven 75th of a gallon (0.093333 gallons per part). The math works out as:

• 3.83 gallons of honey must (41 *0.093333)
• 3.17 gallons of grape juice (34 * 0.093333)

To double check the math we can calculate the specific gravity of the combination. We can just multiply the volume by the specific gravity points for each portion. The add the two together and divide by the combined volume. In our example:

• 651.1 = 3.83 time 170
• 301.15 = 3.17 * 95

Resulting in:

• 136 = 952.25 / 7

The double check confirms the amounts will yield 7 gallons of a mead must with a specific gravity of 1.136.

Actually Mixing The Pyment

Using the basics knowledge of creating a honey must we know that 3.83 gallons of a mead with a specific gravity of 1.170 requires using approximately 19.1 pounds of honey. From the Pearson’s square above we see we need 3.17 gallons of the grape juice.

To me, the easy way to create the pyment is to measure the grape juice into the ferment. Then add the required amount of honey. Since we a making 7 gallons of pyment I would then add enough water to get approximately 6.5 gallons total into the fermenter. Now start mixing the must to get the honey completely dissolved. Once the honey is dissolved, measure the specific gravity of the must. If the must SG is still below the target of 1.136 in measured steps add about a cup of water and totally mix it in. Repeat the measurement and continue adding water and mixing until you reach the target of 1.136.

Just an example but hopefully enough to show you how to work the numbers for your pyment.

Making A Pyment With a Lower SG

If you want to make a pyment that has a specific gravity lower that that of the grape juice you still have to start using an approach like above but then after reaching the target OG of 1.136 you will add even more water to take the specific gravity lower. The percentage of fermentables from grapes and honey will stay the same even as you add water to achieve a lower starting gravity.

Not Co-Fermenting The Pyment

If you don’t co-ferment the grape juice and the honey you are going to blend a finished mead and a finished wine to create your pyment. In my experience, the resultant blend is not quiet as elegant as the result from co-fermenting. With this blending approach you do have the ability to blend for any ratio of wine to honey you desire to get the sensory aspects you find best. In this method you can use Pearson’s Square to calculate several aspects of the blended product. You can use it to calculate the ABV of the blend from the ABV of the two inputs. You can also use it calculate the equivalent percentage of fermentable from honey and grapes by using the specific gravity points of the two input beverages.