new to mead making just wanted to ask a couple questions

[gbaromman]

I have seen some videos on youtube and i was wondering if there was a real difference to boiling water or just doing it straight without water ?

And what is the best yeast to use if I wanted to make a sweet mead with a kick say about 9-10% abv i don't mind medium to dry mead but since I have tasted some mead from Devon in the uk it was amazing how sweet it was and would like to try and make it similar sweetness to that if possible?

also does making larger batches take any longer to ferment say if I made a one gallon mead and wanted a much larger batch would the fermentation take the same amount of time ?

 

[porterpounder]

Don't boil honey for standard mead. You will lose a lot of the best aromatics. Use good clean water, mix the honey, add nutrient per schedule and let it go. With a 9-10% mead it's likely going to end up dry to very dry with most fermentations unless you either stop the fermentation when at the point of sweetness you like (more difficult to do and may maintain some unpleasant flavors), or back sweeten after fermentation is complete.

 

[bernardsmith]

Hi gbarroman - and welcome. By "straight without water" did you mean without boiling or did you really mean "without water"? Honey is typically about 20% water. That means that it is too dry to ferment. In fact , the shelf life of honey is measured in decades - though some people claim that it can be measured in centuries if not thousands of years.
You want to dilute honey 1:4 , for a typical western mead, possibly 1:3 for some Polish meads, or even 1:2 if you like to gamble with near impossible odds. The more concentrated the honey water mixture is (technically called the must) the more problems the yeast have transporting the liquid through their cell walls and using the liquid as their energy source.
The only reason to boil any water is because either it is not potable because of bacteria and other pathogens or it has been treated with chlorine and boiling evaporates off the chlorine. If you use spring water or otherwise potable water and you live in a developed country in the 21st Century then the need to boil water for mead is about the same as the need to boil water to drink or cook or bathe.
The amount of water you use to dilute the honey has very little to do with how sweet the mead will be when you bottle it. Here's the basic rule: yeast eat honey and produce alcohol. The yeast will stop eating the honey when either there is no more honey for the yeast to eat or when the amount of alcohol they have made kills them with alcohol poisoning. So what you want to do to make a sweet mead is to let the yeast eat as much honey as is optimal and then you "remove" the yeast or make any residual yeast unable to eat any more honey - and then you add more honey which will now not be used as the yeast's energy source. In other words, that additional honey will remain untouched by the yeast and so will be available to you as a sweetener.
It takes the yeast the same amount of time (more or less) to work their way through 5 gallons as it does 1. Temperature speeds up or slows down their activity and you really want to let the yeast get to work at lower rather than higher temperatures unless you like the taste of rocket fuel and the "heat" found in that what many consider poorly made alcohol.