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Wondering about temperature... two things, first, when you re-hydrated the yeast to make your starter, did you use boiled water that had cooled and if so, are you sure you cooled it enough? (If the water was too hot when you added the yeast, you could have killed the yeast.) And when you pitched...

Heck, I'd be willing to sell a bottle of my mead for $200... now mine is the most expensive! :)

> I have never got good fruit flavor using just fruit in either primary or secondary. It provides a little color but not really much flavor. In a way I'm glad to read that, cause I thought it was just me. I've never gotten as much flavor as I expected when I added fruit or berries. Substituting...

Correct. But as @VikeMan says, you need to know both the OG and the FG in order to calculate ABV to begin with.

I don't think there's any real benefit to that. Part of the idea behind SNA is not to let the yeast gorge themselves all at once... but now that they already have all that energizer in there, gorge they will. If the kit is designed well, then they shouldn't need any more food -- that is, it's...

Are you sure you weighed the honey accurately? 3 pounds of honey to one gallon should yield SG of about 1.105. Your 1.130 reading seems awfully high. If desperate, maybe consider adding water to dilute it down to a lower gravity, and then pitch more yeast? (Just a thought, not sure that's the...

This is a basic process which will probably work, but it's much better to add the yeast nutrient / energizer in 3 or 4 smaller hits, spread out over the first few days of fermentation -- rather than adding it all at the beginning. I'm recommending what's called "staggered nutrient addition," or...

Another consideration is that some strains of yeast have a reputation for not aging well on the lees. 71B for example is said to produce off-flavors if you leave the mead / must sitting on the yeast cake for a long time rather than racking to a secondary after the initial burst of fermentation...

How often do you us Fleischman's to make mead? I'd be genuinely curious to know if there's anyone out there whose go-to yeast for mead is some particular brand of bread yeast. I bake bread a couple of times a week, but I only brew mead a few times every year. So I always have fresh bread yeast...

Have you ever tried baking bread with any old yeast? Do you think that's what commercial bakers do? I bake bread once or twice a week, and to my knowledge the bread yeast manufacturers are just as careful about consistency as ale/wine yeast makers. But now that I'm thinking about it, there are...

That doesn't sound right. What species of yeast other than Saccharomyces cerevisiae would be in bread yeast? I know that sourdough starters can contain a mix of domestic and wild yeast, plus bacteria as well, but I'd think that commercial bread yeast would be nothing other than S. cerevisiae. If...

If bread yeast works as well as wine yeast, then why do people continue to pay 8 or 10 or 20 times as much for wine yeast? This is a serious question, not trying to be snarky... You can get a pound of Saf Instant bread yeast for $6 or so, but something like K1V wine yeast costs about $50 per...

That looks like good, active fementation to me. The layer of krausen at the top will fall back down in a few days. Relax and be patient...

I definitely should have washed the yeast instead of just using the trub as-is in my starter -- that's the only thing I would have done differently if I had it to do over again. But that's fixable, so I expect the next loaf to be better than the first one. Not that the first loaf was bad -- I've...

5 gallons of my House Bitter; 928 + 5 = 933

So I baked the bread today, and it turned out reasonably well. The loaf rose at least as much as my usual loaves do (using Saf Instant yeast), maybe even a tiny bit more. Structure and etc was indistinguishable from the bread I usually bake. The taste is OK, but the beer I brewed was rather...

Another update... the starter has now spent just over 5 days in my fridge. I fed it twice, and I had to throw some away at one point because it was almost overflowing the jar it lives in. It seems pretty healthy, so I just removed 1 cup of it and made a sponge. (Also fed the remaining starter...

Next time try adding the nutrient in a few smaller amounts over the first few days, instead of all at once -- that's "staggered nutrient addition" (SNA) and it generally works much better than adding all of the nutrient at the beginning. SNA will dramatically improve the quality of your mead...

You don't mention nutrients -- did you add yeast nutrient or energizer, and if so, how much and when? Improper nutrition is one possible / common cause of the jet-fuel taste. Your mead will be drinkable sooner if you use a proper staggered nutrition schedule (although it will still probably...

Terminology question: as I continue to research this, I see references to both "trub" and "barm." Let me add "krausen" while we're at it. Medieval bread recipes often call for "ale barm" which apparently refers to the layer of active, foaming stuff that appears above the wort during early...