Beer primary slurry for a mead?

Going to use US-05 in a semi-sweet (on the sweet side) mead with Wildflower honey.

Have some nice clean US-05 yeast from an Irish Red, any issues with that?
Are the sugars in a beer wort that much different from honey?

The sugars are different, and honey has a pronounced lack of nutrient, but do it anyway!
You'll need some yeast nutrient and preferably energiser, but it will work fine.
You might be surprised at the depth and complexity that will come from the yeast cake.

if he's throwing it on the whole yeast cake he should be fine sans nutrient. should be plenty of residuals.

I agree that the large amount of yeast you have available is tempting, but sorry, I wouldn't do it.

The only yeasts I would use for my meads are sweet mead yeasts or a white wine yeast that yields a sweet wine.

My meads are usually in the 11-12% range. I guess if you were doing something lower than 10% you may consider using the beer yeast.

Good luck.
~r~

US-05 can get to 12% ABV without too much effort (give it early O2 and nutrients, and it will do the job), and unless the ethanol concentration in your Red Ale batch was high enough to cause cell mutations -- that varies from strain to strain -- but typically if you pull the yeast before you've reached 7% ABV, you should be fine. I would not however just dump your batch on the trub, since there will be a lot of yeast metabolism byproducts and toxins in that yeast cake. If you've pulled the yeast and washed it, it should be OK. Just supplement your batch with yeast nutrients and give it a shot.

I've never used beer slurry for a mead, but I have made a HW with HW yeast that I used in a mead...BAD mistake.

Eventhough it was washed yeast the HW had some tones from the mead. I was not happy with the results...I would NOT recommend re-using this yeast for this purpose.

I've used S-33 (dating back to when it was Edme Ale yeast) and produced several delicious 13.5% ABV meads. That was before everyone knew to use plenty of energizer (including me) so I say Go for it...but I'd probably do a smaller batch size. Still, mead is easy to 'save' if something goes wrong, in my experience at least.