Possible to Carbonate Semi-Dry Mead at Home?

[Kitchen]

Is it possible to carbonate bottled Mead that is on the sweeter side of semi-dry, say around 1.010?

My feeling is that traditional bottle conditioning would eat through all of the sugar, making it dry and over-carbonated (possibly leading to exploding bottles). But is there another way of doing this without commercial bottle equipment?

Thanks.

 

[Rice_Guy]

Folks in home brewing do it all the time.

Soda stream has also been used, but that company doesn’t suggest it

 

[dmw_chef]

It takes only a few points of gravity to cause anything but a champagne bottle to explode. You could YOLO it and pasteurize the bottles when you think they've carbed enough (using a PET bottle to gauge carbonation in glass bottles, but that's playing a stupid game. Playing stupid games gets you stupid prizes like a trip to the hospital with multiple lacerations from a bottle bomb.

Stabilize (or sterile filter), back sweeten, then force carb in a keg. Another alternative is to back sweeten with a non-fermentable sugar then use traditional bottle conditioning.

 

[Kitchen]

It takes only a few points of gravity to cause anything but a champagne bottle to explode. You could YOLO it and pasteurize the bottles when you think they've carbed enough (using a PET bottle to gauge carbonation in glass bottles, but that's playing a stupid game. Playing stupid games gets you stupid prizes like a trip to the hospital with multiple lacerations from a bottle bomb.

Stabilize (or sterile filter), back sweeten, then force carb in a keg. Another alternative is to back sweeten with a non-fermentable sugar then use traditional bottle conditioning.

Certainly not looking to do any YOLO experiments, but trying to find a way to force carbonate before bottling on a small scale is what I am thinking.

 

[dmw_chef]

small keg and a beer gun.

 

[winemaker81]

Any yeast carbonation method, if it works, will probably dry out the wine. If you want to carbonate, you'll need CO2 injection.

EDIT: it just occurred to me that using natural carbonation on a sweetened wine may produce dangerous pressure. The yeast doesn't care the some of the sugar is for backsweetening, it will eat until it hits its ABV limit or runs out of sugar.

Another alternative is to backsweeten with a non-fermentable sugar or sugar substitute. Before using any type of non-standard sugar, do a taste test on a small batch. The flavor of some of these is far from optimal.