Mead Wine receipe

I am sure the above recipe works for Joe, but I will make a few comments on it. First, due to the addition of citrus, I would call this a Melomel rather than a mead. Melomel is a mead with fruit added. 4 lbs of honey would make a stronger mead that I like to make but that is a mater of taste. Also, I would add some nutrient, even with the fruit. But the maybe Joe has found a balance where the yeast sticks at about the sweetness he likes. That may depend on the honey used. I prefer to ferment to dryness and then stabilize and use honey to sweeten to taste.

Ray, I'm reasonably sure I'm not the Joe you meant but I don't use near that amount of honey, I use 12 to 14 pounds per 5.5 gallon and end up with a slightly sweet ~12% ABV mead. I do use lemons and lemon zest, I like that as an acid base. I've never used mead yeast, I use EC1118 or K1V.

Joe

Ray,

I think you'd find that 4 lbs of honey in a 1 gallon batch will be pretty close (by my guesstimate, at least) to wine strength after being fermented dry, racked several times, and topped off each time with water.

The Vargas/Gulling book has many useful recipes, but all are single gallon batches. This recipe, and the one for a hot pepper mead, posted by Danny have the same flavor to them as the recipes in "Making Wild Wines and Meads", although I haven't checked to see if they are identical. Not that I'm making any inditement, just pointing out that they seem similar/familiar to me.

Each recipe recommends several rackings, and you lose a large amount (proportionally) of your mead with each racking. I have made single gallon batches from time to time to test a more experimental recipes (methyglyns, for the most part, as I like many herbs and spices but lack the imagination to conceive of how they would taste in a mead), but I gave them up for melomels/pyments, etc, as nearly any of those recipes will be good, and the single gallon size is just too fussy for my tastes.

I also hate the thought of waiting another year to taste a nice mead, once the mere 4 750ml bottles (and a split, maybe) from a gallon batch have been drank or given away. :)

Cheers, Ken Taborek

Joe, You are exactly the one I meant but I was totally wrong and apologize. Your post about sanitizer was immediately above the one by Donny Tyler and evidently my eye skipped a line as I read who posted.

Ray

Yes, If you water the batch down by topping up with water, 4 lbs may be the right amount and that is why I said the recipe might work for the person who wrote and used it. But if that is what he did, he left those instructions out of his recipe. That is why I said that it may well work for him.

A recipe is more than the ingredients and the mixing technique. you must tell how it is cooked and stored. If you assume topping with water the recipe will not work the same for someone who tops with wine or avoids topping altogether by using different size carboys.

Not really criticizing as all the above are valid procedures. You just need to know which to use.

Ray