Ready to bottle batched aged brew

I would add fresh yeast at bottling to your RIS after that length of time. For bigger beers above 9% or so I've gotten into the habit of adding yeast regardless of length of time in primary or secondary. After having a DIPA not carbonate fully, it's just some insurance for me, but again in your case is probably a necessity.

 

My experience echoes Scope4beer's, and I +1 the recommendation. You would likely eventually carbonate a wild ale without additional yeast at bottling after a very long secondary, but I wouldn't take the risk on a clean beer, and a small amount of powdered champagne yeast is quick, easy and cheap insurance on a good result after a year of patience.

 

I suspect you ended up with a high FG saison anyway. Either that or your original saison strain kicked in and finished the job. Champagne yeast strains can't eat maltotriose and are bad at eating maltose.

But that's why they are good for insurance yeast for bottle carbonating...they'll eat the simple (priming) sugars.

Be careful with your meads and ciders though. Any residual sweetness in them is due to your fermentation yeast being killed off/disabled when it reached its ABV limit (or you killed/disabled them with chemical additions). That's how mead makers generally make sweet meads. But the sugars in meads and ciders are all simple sugars. So if you now add a yeast strain with a lower ABV tolerance, you probably won't get much (or any) carbonation. And if you add a strain with a higher ABV tolerance, it will start eating the residual sugars as well as any priming sugar you added, and risk overcarbonation or worse, bottle bombs.

I prefer uncarbonated meads and carbonated ciders. But I force carbonate, due to the issues above.

ETA: But if you know the sugars in your cider fermented completely (by your apparent attenuation, converted to real attenuation, calculations), it would be perfectly safe to bottle prime.

 

If you add priming sugar to a mead whose yeast is already dead/disabled, nothing is going to happen, except it will be sweeter. But adding yeast would be problematic as I said before. If your mead is already sweet, there are sugars left, and anything (like added yeast) that eats your priming sugar will also eat those residual sugars.

What were the original and final gravities of your ciders? If you got something in the area of 122% apparent attenuation, then all the sugars are gone, and it would be fine to add priming sugar and insurance yeast (if you want).

 

100% real attenuation of anything would take your FG below 1.000.

Not that I can think of.

 

If those gravities are accurate, they indicate that there are still simple sugars left, and I wouldn't try to bottle carbonate them, I'm a little surprised by the ciders though. What yeast strain did you use? They're really not very high
OG in relation to any common strains' alcohol tolerance. It's also possible that there was measurement error or a mis-calibrated hydrometer, and the sugars really were all used.

 

I've never done a mead before, but with cider I would add a little bit of yeast at bottling, just to insure there's fresh yeast to eat the priming sugar. When I bottled a cider, it was definitely dry when carbonated. I hear you cannot have a carbonated cider that has been back sweetened without fear of the bottles exploding. The only exception would be if you could force carb in a keg. THEN you can have sweet and carbed cider.

For that RIS, what everyone else said. I would definitely add yeast at bottling. It will probably take long even for it to carb up that way. It would never carb up without any yeast

 

Given all the information as presented so far, I'd bottle and not attempt to carbonate. And take notes next time.

 

And store the bottled cider either refrigerated, or as cool as practical while periodically opening one to make sure they are not developing into exploding bottles.

The re-yeasted stout should do fine, though, with no complications.

 

Yes.

 

Why not try to carbonate the cider or mead like it was soda?

1. Add champagne yeast and priming sugar.
2. Keep the cider/mead at room temp, opening a bottle every few days after about a week to check for carbonation.
3. When the desired carb level is reached, put the bottles in a very cold fridge to crash the yeast out and stop bottle conditioning.
4. Keep the bottles cold until they're gone so they don't blow up.
   
   

 

There was a thread here about 6 months ago about killing the yeast thru the use of a chemical to stop re-fermentation. Maybe that is your method to choose in order to accomplish your carbonation. However, once the mead/cider is bottled, I don't have a clue how to get this chemical into the bottles. Maybe that thread will talk about that.