inchrisin

Recipes 

My girlfriend and I made our first two meads tonight. I've brewed about a dozen times before and we use sanitary practices in most of what we do. I kind of let her take the reigns on this one and she ended up with a vanilla cinnamon mead that looks something like this:

9.5# honey (2.5 wild, 6 clover, and 2 golden honey)

(steeped for 15 min at 160F)
2 vanilla beans
2 cinnamon sticks

added directly to the carboy --it's still hot, and should have cooled it, but it's just going to have to cool gradually

The other is a peach strawberry mead with the same amount of honey (9.5Lb) and with 3 Lb frozen peaches and 3 Lb fresh strawberries added as a pulp.

I've taken the OG of the first batch and it reads 1.062. Low for a wine, but our starters aren't quite ready. I'm wondering if we can add more honey and yeast energizer to the mix to ramp up the abv for later. I'd like to give them a running start when the hit the must.

So far we've just added about a Tablespoon of energizer (DAP, yeast hulls, Magnesium Sulphate, and Vit B complex) to each of the yeasts (Lalvin 1118 Champagne yeast). I figure we can add more honey to the must in a week or two when it's dry.

I'm hoping to get feedback on a time schedule of what to do and when to do it from here on out. Any other advice would be greatly appreciated too. I'll add the yeast when each of the batches gets to about 80F. and will add energizer in about a week, unless I don't see any activity from the blowoff tube. I'll ferment about 75F for a while and see how it goes.

Cheers.

avidhomebrewer

Recipes 

I added more honey to a mead I made a few years ago over time. Started with about 1/3 of the total amount in the boil, then added about 2# or so every other week until it was all in. I started with about 3 gallons of water and added the honey to about a 1/2 gallon or so of water each time. Cooled, and added. Add yeast nutrient too, seeing as honey doesn't have much, if any, nutrients for yeast.

Rainyn

Recipes 

I'm a bit new to this myself. I've got my 2nd batch of mead going (1st was 10 years ago) so I don't quite have any advice for you yet on timetables. I've been playing mine by ear, with lots of hydrometer readings to tell me how it's going.
I did want to at least say that your recipe sounds good. Do come back and let us know how it turns out.

Would you do anything different if you had to do it again?
More specifically, did you have any issues with your fruit as a pulp instead of thrown in as chunks? I'd imagine it would be hard to remove later?