Looking for advice

[Stephen Moody]

I'm currently working on a 1 gallon cherry Mead, although I'm doubting myself on the ingredients I have used. Instead of water and cherries, I used a gallon of tart cherry juice. Any thoughts on what this could do to the final product?

 

[bernardsmith]

Hi Stephen Moody - and welcome. Given the fact that this is to be a mead - with the character of the honey to be somewhere close to the front and center of this wine, my suggestion would be to use - per gallon - perhaps 1 or 2 pints of the juice in the primary* (with the remainder of the liquid coming from water) and if the cherry flavor was too thin at the time you rack into the secondary then to bench test and add more of the cherry juice then. (You could even use the cherry juice to back sweeten if you froze the remaining juice and carefully collected the juice as it thawed. The first 1/3 of the thawed juice will contain all the sugar and flavor).
*This approach comes from the way I make a cranberry mead - noting that cranberry juice is very tart and adding 1 pint of the juice to water and 1.5 lb of honey to make 1 gallon gave me a very drinkable and flavorful mead.

 

[JDWebb]

Tart cherry juice is fine, but beware, try to avoid the cough syrup phenomenon and ferment cool, and make sure you start off sweet, tart cherry juice is just that, tart. 71B yeast is a good one for this. It will drop about 100-110 points, leaving you some residual sweetness. Create a balance by upping the amount of honey to say, 1.150+ to start, or plan on backsweetening to balance the tart with the sweet. Add a vanilla bean for some mouthfeel, maybe a bit of oak also.