Blindly took a shot at mead. Any Advice?

[sacandagabrewing]

So today I gave my first mead a shot and am curious to see what the interwebs has to say in terms of what could be better and what works. Just as a background to the recipe - this is meant to be a draft mead, so lower abv. I wanted to make a 1 gallon batch so I had some room to mess things up. the recipe is as follows:

- 1.75# of honey (I got a honey made from africanized honey bees out of arizona?)
- 1 gallon water
- Dead bread yeast ( I did not have any nutrient so I pitched bread yeast into warm water with some sugar and honey and then boiled that mixture and added it to the carboy once in cooled off) - apparently this can serve as a last minute substitution?
- ICV D-47 yeast

the starting gravity was 1.050 so right now it is sitting at a potential gravity of like 6.5%(ish).

My plan is to let it ferment until it crashes down to dry, transfer it to secondary and bulk age it for 2 weeks and then bottle it up and let the bottles age for 2-4 weeks.

Any thoughts and how I can make this as best as possible? I've never had mead before so who knows what will happen

 

[Seamonkey84]

I would recommend adding something to flavor that. although lower abv batches are ready to drink sooner, they don’t usually use enough honey to add much aroma or flavor. Then again I don’t know how strong the flavor of your honey.
Check out this brewery, they make low abv “craft” meads, https://www.groennfell.com/recipes
and they have a rather entertaining YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/user/Groennfell

 

[sacandagabrewing]

Yeah I was thinking of doing raspberry and lemon zest! I appreciate the help!

 

[bernardsmith]

Or you can think about priming that ABV in the bottle and so make this into a sparkling mead. The thing about carbonating the mead is that even with less than intense flavors (if all the flavor is coming from the honey but you are only using about 1.75 lbs /gallon so not a great deal of flavor) the CO2 helps transport the flavor in a way that the same mead made still doesn't.

That said, adding juicy fruit like rasps is likely to drop the ABV a little. That may not be a big problem but too low an ABV may mean that the shelf life of the mead will not be extensive (but if you are making a single gallon that may not be a real concern).