Need advice for first mead

[Jaeger]

I was thinking of brewing up a Mead for Christmas. My plan is to kinda follow the recipe for JAOM but instead of orange and clove just do blackberry. The plan is for 4 ingredients. Water, Honey, BlackBerry and yeast. My conundrum comes with the yeast.

I figure (for a 7 gallon batch) 18 lbs honey, 7 lbs blackberry and water. In the recipe for JAOM, he uses 1 packet of bread yeast for 1 gallon. Logically, that would mean 7 packets for 7 gallons however, I don't want to overshoot and have it be like 30% alcohol and be super harsh.

How much bread yeast should I use? Should I go with a different yeast? The wide and I like our wines pretty sweet (muscato).

Thanks for the help
Andrew

 

[AkTom]

I do 1 gallon batches. I use 1 tablespoon bread yeast with 1 tablespoon sugar in a cup of 100° water. Wait 15 minutes and add. Your total alcohol content, will depend upon your total fermentables, not so much the total volume of yeast. If I were doing your recipe. I would probably use three or 4 tablespoons of bread yeast. I would also use yeast energizer and yeast nutrient.
Sounds good to me.

 

[Maylar]

Bread yeast quits somewhere between 13-15% alcohol. The JAOM recipe with 3.5 lbs honey per gallon starts at about 1.125 and ends at 1.020 or so. The residual sweetness balances out the bitterness of the orange pith.

With berries instead of orange, I would start with lower gravity unless you want a really sweet mead.

2 grams per gallon is probably a good pitch rate.

 

[Jaeger]

Thanks guys for the help. I will be starting this next Monday (my transition from days to nights :/)

 

[bernardsmith]

JAOM is a very unique mead. The recipe is NOT transferable to any other ingredients and may not be transferable to any other volume (for example, the reason for adding the oranges in the way they are added is to indicate when the CO2 dissolved and absorbed by the mead has been sufficiently expelled). If you are making a regular melomel or any other kind of mead, don't use bread yeast. Use a wine yeast (or an ale yeast if you know why you are selecting such a yeast). Your recipe sounds like it has a potential ABV of about 12% maximum...