Yes, we care. Keep us posted. 
1. 1.004 did seem low for sweet mead yeast.
2. Yep
3. Nice, keep us posted.
More on the original two thoughts - I suspect that sweet mead yeast is actually medium alc tolerant white wine yeast that they found to work well with meads and slapped the mead label on it. The sugar profile and ph of mead fermentation is similar to wine fermentation and that’s why instead of using just the sweet mead yeast you can choose from a whole arsenal of wine yeast (white and red). That’s not to say that the sweet mead yeast isn’t a good choice, just that there are options.
As far as fermentation temps go, a lot can be learned by reading about wine fermentation. Anyway, per usual this has been an interesting discussion. cheers, j
Last mead I made I used champaign yeast and it had an FG of 0.99 or so. Didn’t keep good notes so I don’t remember my OG
EDIT I havn’t tasted it yet. It will be a year in teh bottle next month and I will crack one open.
Late to the party again, me.
I like Wyeast 4184 “Sweet Mead Yeast” It is very well behaved and drops like a stone when done fermenting. Super clear mead. I use a laser pointer to check my meads for turbidity. 4184 clears to the point where the laser beam is not visible in the mead when shone though my glass carboys.
Wyeast yeast strain specs say temp range for 4184 = 65⁰-75⁰F
Hey all,
Been off the forum for a very long time. Time to catch up.
Fermentation temp - anything around 70 degF (=/- 5 deg) is typically fine for most wine and mead yeasts. Bad Brewer and Jay… have a great handle on the yeast flavors and fermentation temps. Yeast health also has a lot to do with off flavors.
Yeast types - I know a lot of people who swear by the Sweet Mead yeast and have obviously done well with it (Kibzey and Formanek from Chicago). I plan to use it on a future batch of traditional mead, but have no experience with it yet. My house strain (almost exlcusive) is the Narbonne (Lalvin 71B). My favorite by far, it gives a nice ester profile (fruitiness) to the mead. The biggest drawback is it’s ability to consume sugar.
Curt
As in it consumes too much or it is inadequate in drying out the final product?
– Scott
I’m sure he means it dries out the final product. That’s been my experience with it.
Update, for what it’s worth: I actually split this batch, adding little blue grapes to half while leaving the other half alone, using the sweet mead yeast for both. Got very different results. At one point, SG was 0.995 on the grape mead (not really a pyment because I only used roughly a pound per gallon) while SG was 1.016 on the unadulterated version. At that point, I sorbated the sweet plain mead and it finished a little later at 1.011. So I guess my point is, you’ll get different results depending on what you do with adding fruit or not, etc., but if you do want to halt fermentation, do it a little early to let a few more points fall and then it will indeed quit. Personally I’m happier with the sweeter mead, very delicious and just the right sweetness to suit my own taste, though the grape one is more tannic and earthy and it should be interesting to age it for a while.
Slainte mhath,