Well after really getting back into brewing beer I decided to try my hand in brewing some mead. I really appreciate the history of mead and want to experience this through making some of my own. I also wanted to try to do a classic honey mead and a flavored with fruit mead, or melomel.
So to start I went and purchased 6lbs of honey to split between the two batches along with 3LBs of frozen cherries. For the classic honey mead I used a one gallon Carboy, boiled 1 gallon of water to sanitize it and let it cool a bit, then poured 3 lbs of honey into the water, stirred, and transferred to the Carboy to cool further.
For the melomel with cherries I repeated the boiling of water, used a small amount of the water to thaw the cherries and mashed them with a potato masher to extract more juices as I am not putting all of the cherries into the Carboy. I also only used two pounds of the cherries as I didn’t want to overwhelm the honey. After mashing the cherries, I sifted off about half of the actual cherries and kept the juices, then added them to the Carboy along with the three remaining pounds of clover honey. I ended up using Lavlin V1116 for my yeast and split one 5g packet between the two carboys. I also added one teaspoon of yeast nutrient to each.
The OG of the honey mead ended up being 1.104 and the melomel was 1.124.
I’m curious to see what the final gravity will be. I’ve read the it should take about two months to ferment and then I’ll either place them into secondary or bottle to bottle age as long as fermentation is finished. What should I expect in terms of bottle aging expectations for drinkability?
So to start I went and purchased 6lbs of honey to split between the two batches along with 3LBs of frozen cherries. For the classic honey mead I used a one gallon Carboy, boiled 1 gallon of water to sanitize it and let it cool a bit, then poured 3 lbs of honey into the water, stirred, and transferred to the Carboy to cool further.
For the melomel with cherries I repeated the boiling of water, used a small amount of the water to thaw the cherries and mashed them with a potato masher to extract more juices as I am not putting all of the cherries into the Carboy. I also only used two pounds of the cherries as I didn’t want to overwhelm the honey. After mashing the cherries, I sifted off about half of the actual cherries and kept the juices, then added them to the Carboy along with the three remaining pounds of clover honey. I ended up using Lavlin V1116 for my yeast and split one 5g packet between the two carboys. I also added one teaspoon of yeast nutrient to each.
The OG of the honey mead ended up being 1.104 and the melomel was 1.124.
I’m curious to see what the final gravity will be. I’ve read the it should take about two months to ferment and then I’ll either place them into secondary or bottle to bottle age as long as fermentation is finished. What should I expect in terms of bottle aging expectations for drinkability?
