My mead experience so far has been with making melomels. But now I'm going to make a couple of traditional batches and a metheglyn. I was going to use tupelo honey for one of the traditionals and local wildflower honey for other and for the jasmine metheglyn. I like my meads on the sweet side. My yeast choices are D-47, EC-1118, 71B, and Cotes-de-Blanc. I was thinking about using the 71B in the tupelo mead and Cotes-de-Blanc in the other two. Does this sound like a good strategy to those of you with more experience?
Hum? Well, it depends on a few things. I'm not a big fan of RedStar yeasts, there's not enough published data about them.
So, with D47, while it's a good yeast, you really need to get it fermenting under temperature controlled conditions (so if it gets warm in your part of Illinois, and you don't have temp control to keep D47 below about 70F......), keeping the ferment temperature to the lower levels of the range - otherwise you can easily end up with paint thinners.....
EC-1118, while also good, seems to have a habit of blowing far too much of the flavour/aroma elements straight out the airlock, hence I'd only suggest it, if you intending to make a champagne or sparkling mead and/or you have a stuck ferment.
C-d-B ? No comment, only used it a couple of times and wasn't happy with the results - the lack of data, meant I couldn't work out how to improve those batches (plus some laziness on my part).
71B - well I do prefer the likes of K1V and/or D21, but would suggest that is probably the way to proceed. It often produces product that can be drunk early. It's got a reasonable range and low nutrient needs. Though I prefer to ferment dry and back sweeten as there's far more control that way, hence I prefer the above mentioned two....