Hi Usename - and welcome.
What's a good first time bread to bake? What about cheese? What's the best first time painting to paint? Best first time melody to play on a guitar? The best first mead to make is - in my opinion - the simplest - using quality honey - perhaps orange blossom, quality water, a gentle yeast that highlights flavors and aromas and does not work to strip them. I would eat the fruit and leave adding fruit to the first mead you make for which you have a complete understanding and a solid protocol. The more complex your recipe , the more variables , and the more variables, the less you will be able to learn from this exercise.
If I were you (and I am not, I know) I would blend about 1.25 lbs of honey in enough water to make a gallon; add a couple of teaspoons or even a tablespoon of Fermaid O, a pack of 71B (yeast) or D47 and aim for an ambient temperature of about 70F . This will be a session mead (an ABV of about 6.5%); will ferment dry; will be ready to bottle in about 3 or 4 weeks. You might prime this mead with about 20-25 g sugar dissolved in a cup or so of boiling water then allowed to cool before adding to your bottling bucket (or about 1 teaspoon of sugar added to each bottle. If you prime the mead to carbonate it then you will need to bottle in beer bottles (or champagne bottles but champagne bottles are about twice the size so you will want to add 2 teaspoons of sugar to each bottle).
Sanitation is important - You want to control access to any and all bacteria and yeast you provide the mead. Anything that touches your mead you want to be sure is not going to harbor any colony of yeast or bacteria that can infect it or compete with the yeast you have selected. If you are in fact adding fruit you may want to make sure that they are not likely to infect your mead, but if you are adding commercially produced juice that juice is likely to have been pasteurized. In addition there are many mead and wine makers who feel that if their wine or mead has a high enough alcohol content (about 11%) the alcohol will act to sanitize any fruit they add to the secondary fermenter.
And they add fruit to the secondary and not to the primary because they argue that the fermentation that takes place in the secondary is less aggressive and so more of the flavors and aromas that come from the fruit will remain in the fermentation and not be blown off. They also argue that the alcohol present in the mead extracts more of the flavors from the fruit than might be extracted by the water in the primary... Like I say, the more variables the harder it will be to control the process and to learn from what you are doing...
![Craft A Brew - Safale BE-256 Yeast - Fermentis - Belgian Ale Dry Yeast - For Belgian & Strong Ales - Ingredients for Home Brewing - Beer Making Supplies - [3 Pack]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51bcKEwQmWL._SL500_.jpg)
