Would the Owner of this Honeydew mead please step forward

I'm about to make this mead, but I have forgotten who gave me the original recipe. I have some questions. Here is the recipe :

18# light honey (this batch came from a huge local grocery store that sells local wildflower at a decent price)
seven over-ripe honeydew melons (EDIT: I'll be using about three more melons next time)
water to five gallons
narbonne yeast (3 quart starter)
staggered yeast nutrient additions (per HighTest)

We did fruit in primary. Cut melons in half, then cubed into aprox. 1-inch cubes which were placed into a coarse nylon bag, then pounded all to bits with a potato masher after the bag was put into a fermenting bucket. Must was mixed in a separate sanitized bucket, then poured over fruit. Pitched yeast, staggered nutrient.

Primary was three weeks, secondary four, cold crashed for two, presently crystal clear in tertiary (three weeks now). Will be bottling soon, and this one is drinkable now. Gonna be tough to keep my hands off of these bottles!


Please met me know if this was your recipe!

unless narbonne yeast is something magical or a low tolerance yeast, this recipe seems awful quick and impossible to me, seeing as it was bottled.

Narbonne yeast is sold by Lalvin, branded as 71B. Using Hightest's staggered nutrient additions, you could easily take a melomel must with an initial gravity of 1.130 to dryness in 10 days to two weeks; I know because I've done it repeatedly, using 71B. So 3 weeks in primary is maybe a little long. Crystal clear in 9 weeks total (3 in primary and 4 in secondary, plus 2 of cold crashing) for a melon melomel is what I find a little harder to believe, but given the fact that 71B does flocculate into pretty tight lees pretty quickly, I think it is certainly possible....