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To get a big sweet mead without backsweetening you need a higher final gravity. More final gravity means more sweetness left. Plain sweet meads start around 1.020 final gravity but can be quite a bit higher if you are mixing in a lot of acidic fruits as you need sweetness to balance the fruit...

I've bought the 60 lb pails from Dutch Gold. Here's their web link though you can occasionally find their same stuff from other vendors at a few dollars less: https://www.dutchgoldhoney.com/store/honey-varietals/60-lb-pails Cost varies from $3-4 a pound depending on what variety you want after...

+5 gal Raspberry and +5 gal Mixed berry (so far) Total now 15

Very cool - I did something somewhat similar: 1.5 gal Blueberry Juice, 1.5 gal Black Currant Juice and 1.5 gal Tart Cherry juice plus about 17-18 lbs of honey. Its clearing quite nicely but has not reached the point where I've tried to sample it yet.

Have you made a pear/raspberry? I ask because I understand it can be hard to preserve the pear flavor without backsweetening.

Cranberries do sound interesting - I know tart fruits work best to counterpoint the honey background. Peaches I've heard tend to fade quite a bit in fermentation - even the pro peach meads seem to be very faint on peach flavor.

Using TONSA-2 nutrients (GoFerm, Fermaid-O) you can get the primary fermentation done just over 2 weeks in most cases. If the fruit is in the primary, I'll usually leave it for two weeks which will get me well below 1/3 sugar and remove it a few days before racking. For something like...

I've got a few meads under my belt and learned a lot about working with real fruit and TONSA2/honey/fermentation. I have a pure raspberry and blueberry/currant/cherry going but was trying to decide what to try next. I like big meads with a lot of fruit flavor. Here's some candidates I was...

I use 71B for most of my meads and melomels. For me it tops out around 14.9% (your mileage may vary) so I plan my batch around that. If you want a very sweet meet (say 1.025 or 1.030) you just calculate the OG based on 14.9% (roughly a 110 point sugar drop) and start around 1.035 or 1.040...

All of the pros I know use the latest TONSA 2 nutrient schedule here which uses Goferm at startup followed by four Fermaid-O additions http://www.meadmaderight.com/info.html Also you should degas twice a day for the first 1/2 and once a day until you get to at least the 1/3 sugar point...

That's the one I have - works well for both buckets and carboys and I've used it on mead and wine!

I would get a degasser for sure, but the rest you likely have on hand. If you have kegs you can bypass the whole bottling thing and just keg the wine at 1-2 psi which is what I do. If you really get into it you can get a nitrogen tank for wine to avoid any carbonation at all.

Just my two cents but I got an eclipse Zinfandel kit recently and was disappointed that it had EC-1118 yeast in it which was not appropriate to the style. winexpert and others love to use this yeast because it ferments fast and drops quickly, but it is also highly attenuative and may thin out...

Just my two cents but the easy way to make a Braggot is to make a nice beer, then make a nice sweet mead and combine the two after they are finished "to taste". That lets you get the balance right.

They actually just got bought out by another company and I think they are going through a bit of a reorganization now. Not sure how long they will be in limbo, but hopefully not long.

Hi, BeerSmith does not modify the color for length of the boil - as far as I know no one's software does. The Maillard reaction that darkens the wort is not well modeled and includes a lot of variables beyond boil time, so I don't have a good equation to simulate it in the program. Further...

You can change the sort order of ingredients by clicking on the various headers for the ingredients list. Also you can grab a ton of ingredients including the latest yeasts and hops by clicking on the "add-on" button and adding new packs from there. It is very easy to do. Brad

Hi - make sure the program is not running first from the task manager. Next just manually download the update from http://beersmith.com/download-beersmith and install it. After that you should be good as the latest fixes should enable downloading of future updates. Brad

Hi, When you go to task manager make sure "BeerSmith2.exe" is not running on the Processes tab. The fact that you can't write to the file indicates it probably is still running. It may show up in the Applications tab, but will show up in the Processes tab. Kill it there, then install the...

Hi, - Shut down the process from task manager - Download and install the latest update (2.2.12) from BeerSmith.com main download page and it should fix it - We had a bug in one of the 2.2 releases that could cause it to hang for some users - it was fixed about a day later - sorry for the...