Me and a friend just did a 25 liter split batch, half of it with 2 kilos of blueberries and a little black berries, and the other half clean. 1.120 starting gravity, don't remember what it ended at but around 15,5-16% alcohol. We followed the mead batch builder:
https://www.omnimead.com/mead-batch-builder
How different is this to 1 month mead? It recommends a mix of Ferm K and Ferm O, which worked great for us as we had both at hand. I read from two different posters here that the yeast cannot use these nutritions above 9% alcohol for some reason, and we added our last dose close to 10%. Hard to tell if we have any off-flavours due to this but I think it tastes good!
I followed advice to ask at a market if I could bulk buy "second grade" honey from a bee keeper and he gave us 50 kilos for a very good price. Very happy! It tastes delicious, some of it is a little fermented but it actually improves the taste IMO. It's not orange blossom but we tasted one of the bottles we made without fruit this weekend and it was very nice. 1388 yeast.
I made a starter for the yeast and keep a small part for future use in my fridge, protected by a large chunk of the honey water which was used as the starter. How long can I keep it like this? It's been almost 2 months. Should I make a new starter and feed it to keep it alive or is it ok to lay dormant until we choose to make a new batch? I guess it's best to start with a small starter and increase size a few times when building up the yeast count for next time due to the small amount of yeast as of now.
When we added the fruit we just had it frozen since the summer in vacuum bags, we just thawed it, no campden or pasteurizing. No mold, seems to have worked.
Thanks Bray for your amazing work for the mead community