first batch ever, any tips?

[Fearspork]

home brewer for 15 years, all grain 4 years, hard cider and jack 2 years, here we go mead

went ahead and bought 5 gal of monarchs choice wild flower honey, the price was right. i also bought red star Montrachet and cuvee dry yeast i already have yeast nutrient and energizer and a oxygen stone. my master plan was to do 2 separate 5 gal batches with approx. 1 gal of honey each. one plain and one cherry melomel. the melomel i plan on adding 1/2lb frozen and crushed cherries to the secondary for a few weeks before racking a 3rd and maybe 4th time. finally i want to split both batches up, make half still and half sparkling.

my question is is there anything to it, but to do it ? i've never done mead and i find myself looking at multiple recipes, some super simple(honey water raisins yeast) and some super complicated (with multiple nutrient additions and periodic degassing) i find myself only liking bits and pieces of each recipe. is there any glaring problems with the plan here

 

[bernardsmith]

Fearspork - Your plan is to add 1/2 lb of cherries to 5 gallons of mead... You don't think that the amount of cherry flavor that this will produce will be a little thin? If this is your first attempt at making mead do you really want to begin with five gallons of a wine (about 11% ABV ) that may not quite meet your expectations? The "simple" recipes - with raisins in place of nutrient? - seem a little amateurish while the "super complicated" sound quite standard (wine and mead makers degas and tend to aerate during active fermentation and the "multiple nutrient additions" is a very standard and effective way to provide nutrients (honey, as you know, contains almost none of the nutrients that the yeast need) when the yeast can most effectively use them... 11% ABV contains a wee bit more alcohol - and so is a little more stressful for the yeast than most brewers are used to )... Your call, of course - and while brewers tend to claim (with good reason ) that making 5 gallons takes about the same amount of time as 1 gallon .. enjoying 5 gallons of a first attempt at mead may be a lot harder to swallow than a single gallon - and making five single gallons sequentially provides the novice mead maker with far more experience than making a single batch of 5 gallons..

 

[Drewed]

A couple of other notes as well. A gallon of honey is about 12 lbs. 12 lbs to 5 gallons of water is going to ferment bone dry and then some. Also mead makers tend to shoot for between 1/2 to 1 full lb per gallon for fruit.
I can see the desire to make 5 gallons to start, especially if you have the 5 gallon gear, but one gallon carboys are cheap.
There is a "mead builder" calculator that includes nutrient scheduled, but nothing about adding fruit. http://www.meadmakr.com/batch-buildr/
That may help you with your recipe.

 

[Fearspork]

mead builder app is great, thank you guys, going to add 4 or 5 lbs of fruit, i was aiming for dry because i was to bottle condition carbonate a few, and i was worried a semi sweet would leave me with a case of bottle bombs, any thoughts on that? Montrachet yeast is supposed to top out at 13% alcohol and 12lbs of honey gets me around there. i appreciate the advise to practice with a gallon, my wife agrees with you but i can't see waiting between 4 months to 2 years to find out if its good and only have a gallon to show for it, rest assured if it comes out skunked my brother will drink anything

 

[bernardsmith]

Skunked is not on the cards (no hops) but one danger when using berries is that wines/meads sometimes taste medicinal...
The other thing about the published tolerances of yeast is that such limits are a little like the strain loads published for rope... If the manufacturer says 500 lbs it is likely the rope will happily take 750 lbs and perhaps even 1000... but there is no guarantee that if you need the rope to take 600 it will and if you lose your life relying on the 600 lbs, you were told... So, 13% is expected... but you might find that this yeast will happily thrive in an 18% ABV mead... So bottom line: don't believe the "topping out " data when that is to your advantage but rely on it when it's not...

 

[Fearspork]

point taken on the yeast, is there anyway to avoid bottle bombs with semi sweet bottle carbonated mead, otherwise im stuck with dry mead anyway

 

[bernardsmith]

" but one danger when using berries is that wines/meads sometimes taste medicinal..." Not sure what in fact causes this flavor - It may be a lack of balance between the ABV and the TA (titratable acdity). Normally, you want the TA to be around .65 g/L of acidity but if the ABV is relatively high the TA may need to be higher (more of the fruit acids - NOT a lower pH)

 

[bernardsmith]

point taken on the yeast, is there anyway to avoid bottle bombs with semi sweet bottle carbonated mead, otherwise im stuck with dry mead anyway

Cider makers on this forum may disagree but unless you force carbonate there is really no good way to finish with both a sweet AND a carbonated mead. The yeast won't stop fermenting when they have simply carbonated your bottles. The idea offered by cider makers , that you monitor the fermentation after bottling and then you kill the yeast by pasteurizing when the CO2 is producing the amount of pressure you want may (I say may) be doable - but forget the danger of heating glass bottles already under pressure with CO2 - the problem is that you will be cooking the honey and fruit and if you spent good money on buying quality honey and quality fruit it makes very little sense to me to expend energy in destroying the molecules that produce the aromatics and flavors.

 

[Fearspork]

yeah i tried to force carbonate semi sweet cider with campden tablets and a corney keg, it was stable for 3 weeks then i ended up with a case of tasty fountains.

 

[bernardsmith]

To stabilize a mead or wine you need to add BOTH K-meta (the active ingredient of Campden tabs) and K-sorbate in tandem. And neither are effective in the presence of a large colony of viable yeast. Large colonies of lab cultured yeast is fairly impervious to K-meta. It's typically used to handicap wild volunteer cells before you pitch the billions of cells of your yeast.

 

[Fearspork]

quick update, i ended up doing 2 batches, i had no way to weigh the honey so i poured out a gallon and then just added water till i got the gravity i was looking for, for a dry mead. ended up with 3 gal 1.124 cuvee yeast and 4 gallon 1.104 montrochet batch. I'll update if it ever turns out

 

[Drewed]

point taken on the yeast, is there anyway to avoid bottle bombs with semi sweet bottle carbonated mead, otherwise im stuck with dry mead anyway

I'll take the counter point to posted above that you can do a semi sweet bottle carbonated mead by pasturising. I have done it. You are not taking the bottles to any amount of extreme heat so you are not adding but a few psi. I place an old four sack towel in my 5 gallon brew pot. I then fill it with bottles, placing one empty one in the middle. I them fill the empty bottle with tap water and fill the pot with tap water to the level of the liquid in the bottles, or a little above, but no floaters! Then I place my remoter thermometer in the open bottle and set the whole works on the stove and turn on the heat. Place the cover on the pot, just in case! When the probe reads 140 kill the heat and leave the pot alone for at least 10 min. After 10 min, remove the bottle using a silicone hot mitt and I then lay them down in the sink to cool. I have not noticed any change in the flavor.