currant mead OG 1.360 ?? too high to pitch yeast?

Just put together my first "normal" mead.

One gallon batch

3.5 lbs honey
2 hand full dried currants (like raisins)
1/2 lemon juice
1/2 lemon zest
Champagne yeast red star


I heated water and tossed in currant raisins to to dissolve honey. Squeeze in juice and add zest. Cool down to 70 F take gravity and found it to be 1.360!!

Do I need to thin this out with water before pitching? Can yeast even survive in that gravity?

That is way too high, I would suggest diluting it to at least twice its current volume. 3.5# of honey would take up almost half a gallon of space by itself, not leaving you much room for the water in your 1 gallon batch. The yeast won't handle that and if they do ferment, you will end up with a sickly sweet mead. Think of drinking almost straight honey.

However you dice it, it's gonna be a sweet mead. BUT, 3.5 lbs of honey in 1 gallon of water should not yield that gravity based on what I'm seeing. It should put you closer to 1.120 (of course, this is without the currants). The currants should up your sugars a little bit but not a ton if they're dehydrated (i.e. the sugars are not fully dissolved into the must yet). Even still, it's like saying the two handfuls of currants added more sugars to your must than the honey (by 2X!!). I'm thinking you got a bad reading; maybe the must is not homogeneous?

That sounds like a JAOM recipe. Are you sure you measured the gravity correctly? Many people get an OG around 1.130 (myself included). A normal hydrometer doesn't measure that high either, at least the ones that I've seen at LHBS's don't.

OK...
I misread the hydrometer. The reading was 1.138 I diluted down to 1.114 and pitched yeast. Hope I have not screwed this up. I was wanting a sweet mead, but due to diluting down to lower gravity I may end up with dry mead.

Live and learn I suppose.

Still... 1.138 was higher than anything I had ever seen before. Kinda threw me off.

I bet you'll be fine. 3.5# of honey in 1 gallon finishes pretty sweet anyway, so you might have yourself the makings of a pretty good mead there!

I've pitched at 1.142 before with Premier Cuvee and it worked fine. Even stepped in additional brown suger once it got going to raise about another 0.024 on top of the original. Some yeast can be pretty tough.