Orange Honey Mead

This is my first mead recipe that me and a friend are working on. Recipe includes:

2 Naval Oranges (Each cut into 4 wedges)
3 Small Boxes California Raisins (to add Tartaric Acid)
1 Cup Lemon Juice (to add Citric Acid)
3 lbs of Honey
1 Red Star Yeast Packet (need to figure out the type and will update)
13 Cups of Water

1. First cleaned anything that needed sterilized.

2. Boiled the water and then took it off the stove (didn't want honey to caramelize).

3. Mixed the honey into the water until melted all the way.

4. Added the 8 slices of naval oranges (2 whole oranges sliced into 4's) as well as the raisins (ensure that you abuse these a bit before adding) and also threw in the lemon peels as well (about half the lemons we used). These were added to a mesh bag for easy fishing out of said items.

5. I sprinkled the whole packet of yeast (good for 5 gallons) into the mixture but if you want to ensure the right amount is in it, only do about 1/5th of a packet.

6. Closed up and currently on Night 3. We will rack to secondary on the 7th day to ensure that fermentation took its course.

7. [Not Finished] We plan on letting it sit in the carboy (secondary fermentation) for about 3 weeks before we even attempt to taste it. Heres to hoping



NOTE:

We started out with a wine making kit (1 carboy, 1 food grade gallon bucket, 1 auto-siphon, other small items) but recipe is original.

Any pointers would be helpful

 

From what I have read and from personal experience, you don't need to scale down the yeast packet addition to 1/5th for a 1 gallon batch. The whole packet of yeast would be fine. In addition to this, I would also hydrate the yeast prior to pitching it since you don't mention hydrating the yeast. Odds are it will still ferment just fine, regardless.

Do you plan on removing the oranges, etc on the 7th day?

 

Yep. Already removed the oranges. we did indeed use the whole packet and siphoned out the mead. Now it is sitting in the carboy. Picture soon

 

Our mead now in secondary. will be waiting 2-3 months before we pull it to test it.

 

I would try to top that off a little bit to get rid of most of that headspace. That looks like just a tad too much in the pic. I've had good luck adding in a mix of 1/2 pound of honey and water for topping off in my 1 gallon meads. Better than adding just water, IMO.