ZooBrew

Recipes 

Chaucer's is great Mead. I keep a bottle around for comparative also.

Trader Joe's carries it here.

MedsenFey

Recipes 

Mixing up a mead must is easy. Waiting 1-2 years to enjoy it will test the patience of Job. Patience is the most difficult ingredient to find in mead making (and the most important), but you rarely see a recipe include it.

For a 5 gallon batch, 10 pounds of peaches will give you a noticeable presence. 20+ pounds will lay it on strong.

With the starting gravity you have, even Cote des Blancs (which is a fine yeast by the way) is going to take it bone dry. You will probably be able to make it sparkling, but it will be dry sparkling.

If you want to make it semi-sweet, you can let the yeast take it dry, and let it clear. Then add sulfite (potassium metabisulphite) and potassium sorbate - you need both - which will prevent the yeast from fermenting when you add more fermentable sugar. This is known as "stabilizing" the mead.Then you can add in more honey to bring it up to just the level of sweetness that suits you (which is called "backsweetening").

The easy way is to take a big glass of mead and add honey a little at the time until it tastes just right. Then measure the gravity of the sweetened mead so you know what your goal is. With that, you can calculate how much honey by weight you need to add to the rest of the batch to reach your target final gravity.

I hope that helps.

Medsen

P.S. Chaucers is a good mead but very,very sweet.

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BierSnob

Recipes 

If you want a sweeter mead bump the honey to 15 lbs and use either the 71b, 47d or Wyeast 4242 Chablis yeasts they drop out around 12 to 14%. I personally have only used the 71b which works well for semi-sweet meads. Loose rule of thumb 1lb honey around 1% alcohol, not exact but close when fermenting dry. The peaches will also add to the alcohol content, so a yeast with a lower tolerance should work.

KenSchramm

Recipes 

I laughed hard at this. Degaussing is the process of removing the built up electrical charge from a CRT or other electric device to insure it performs as it should. Degassing is the process of agitating the mead to get the excess carbon dioxide out during fermentation. It's easy and a good idea if you are willing to put in the effort. I've degaussed a lot of monitors and degassed a lot of meads, but never thought about how the two might be combined.

More peaches. Definitely more peaches.

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hightest

Recipes 

FWIW, Degaussing is the process of decreasing (or eliminating) an unwanted magnetic field... Something I did often in my earlier years as a color TV technician... It is not something to be concerned with when making mead...

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