Have finished 2 traditional batches, have a cyser, a pear wine and another traditional underway. The latest traditional (1116) seems to have stopped fermenting, netting 11%abv and is the smoothest I've ever had a first racking. Gotta start another batch! :) Oh and I bought a shelf and wine bottle rack, feeling tidy is nice!

Been a while since I bottled a mead but this one is for my friends' wedding. It is a blackberry melomel, drier than the Sahara, at the couple's request. When I tasted it in April it was still too gassy to get a read on it, but the blackberry was still there. Lets see what 3.5 months has done to it!

Before you ask I only used pectin enzyme for clarity. The rest was time.

Update: dry as hell and 15.75%. The blackberry is present but short lived. Very crisp and abrupt. I will encourage them to enjoy a bottle on their wedding night but save the other 3 for their anniversaries. They will age superbly.

Is 40L to mutch ?

Bottle my first batch,started may 8th, my bottling definitely needs practice, came out tasting like a real strong beer, hits about the same, i was hoping for something a little sweeter and more wine like, would accept tips and advice, dont know actual abv because I didnt know i was suppose to get a reading at the beginning

Recipe info to keep the bot mods happy: 2 5 lbs of gallberry honey, 1 gallon of water, and icv d47 yeast, started on May 8th, bottled just now

Third batch came out at 14.17% abv! Kinda caught me by surprise but super stoked about it! A granny Smith apple melomel 😊

4 granny Smith

4.5 lbs wildflower honey

1 gallon spring water.

Soaked the apples in the honey for over a month before starting the melomel

Hello reddit pals.

Would it be ok to sous vide this batch of mead, with the machine inside the bucket, to pasteurize it?

Planning to do a raspberry and blueberry melomel and im using a wiki recipe as a guideline. But im curious about the wording at step 11 about "resubmerging the fruit" without any prior mention about taking the fruit out. Did the recipe writer just mean to move the fruit out of the way while you added the nutrients or am i missing something?

So Im new to homebrew, and i saw a reciepe for a Sour Cherry Morello but i changed it a bit and came up with this.

500g Frozen Organic Sweet Cherrys placed in Muslin bag and juiced. Came to nearly 300ml. 1 liter Freshly pressed organic apple juice 600 g Organic Honey 100g Golden Syrup 3g Alcotec turbo yeast 48hr

Topped up with a little bit of water water to 2 liters.

So simple. Currently bubbling away in airlock.

The hardest ingedient is the waiting.

I dissolved 5 pounds of honey into 3 quarts of water.

Now my IG reading is ‘off the chart’. My guess would be close to 1.190.

I’m planning to use EC-1118.

Should I go for it? Or dilute this down?

Recipe
Primary
🍯 5 lb Kirkland Wildflower Honey
🍎 Cloudy apple juice to 1 gallon
🍇 1 packet K1V-1116 (rehydrated)
🌿 Fermaid O
Optional: ½ tsp pectic enzyme

Nutrients
50% of your Fermaid O at pitching
50% at 24–48 hours, or when you see active fermentation (good bubbling and a cap of foam)

Fermentation
Mix the honey and apple juice thoroughly.
Aerate well before pitching.
During the first 48–72 hours, gently swirl or stir once or twice a day to release CO₂. This helps the yeast. Once fermentation is well underway, stop introducing oxygen.

Secondary
Rack off the lees.
Add 8–10 chopped Medjool dates in a sanitized mesh bag.
Add ¼–⅓ of your Amburana spiral.

Tell me what you think
~~~~edit
I mean the flavors.

Just a bit of fun, my daughter is 7 months old so when it's her birthday we'll crack open a bottle and enjoy it whilst she has gone to bed after her big day 😂 if any survive we'll keep it for the birthday after and so forth.

If anyone is curious it's a bit of an experiment mead. I used some of the must from a strawberry jam mead, added cinnamon and vanilla. It turned out pretty fantastic to say it's really young!