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Campden doesn't kill cultured yeast, at least not at the levels you'd want to use it at without significantly hindering the flavor and aroma of your beer. The problem with using Campden (Potassium Metabisulfite) is that it adds significant levels of free and bound SO2 to your beer. This will cause your beer to smell and taste like sulfur. Wine is ...

I'm HIGHLY suspicious of substituing aspirin for metasulfate (the active compound in Campden tablets). Different chemicals and I've never heard of aspirin being effective against yeasts at normal concentrations. Certainly not a single tablet or two (or more). Aspirin is not an effective antimicrobial in the concentrations that you would want to drink. It ...

I have used potassium metabisulfite, the main component in campden tablets, a couple of times to stop fermentation in my cider. Although I now use Potassium Sorbate instead to reduce the amount of sulfites. Campden tablets do not kill yeast but actually makes the environment inhospitable for the yeast. It does this by releasing sulfur dioxide into the ...

AFAIK, the tabs are standardized. One tab has enough sulfite to treat 20 gal. of water, so 1/2 tab is enough for your needs. If the tabs are are 550 mg., I'd base the powder measurements on that. It would be easy to add a dose of powder and either smell or taste the water to see how effective it was. BTW, water guru Martin Brungard has recently written ...

WY1084 can be a slow starter. On at least 3 occasions has 1084 left me with no visible signs of fermentation for 72 hours, and then it springs into life. Give it 72 hours and then decide what to do. I'd be very surprised if the yeast really are dead. More than likely you'll see signs of fermentation. You can use either campden tablets (1 per gallon is ...

I vote for #1. First of all, the reason to smack a pack is to assess the viability, not to grow more yeast. Maybe you were already aware of that. Did it swell at all? Your OG was higher than I like to direct pitch, but not so high as to give you real problems. Your wort should still be OK given good cleaning and sanitiation procedures, but you could ...

Yes, you can make mead without campden tablets. I only use them for stabilizing the mead at the end. 1 campden tablet per gallon to ensure fermentation does not kick back up. I have never added them to the beginning. Some people will pasteurize/boil their meads, claiming that pasteurization will kill all impurities. That is an old school mentality, as ...

Honey is aseptic. The water content is too low for microorganisms to develop, so there is no need to pasteurize or use campden. Campden is used in winemaking to eliminate the wild yeasts which exist on grape skins, this helps ensure a more consistent product by eliminating the variation introduced by wild yeasts. None of this is necessary with mead and in ...