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Recipe & Process
Recipe & Process
Original Volume: 1 gal / Final Volume: 0.75 gal
3 qts total of apple juice and cranberry juice mixed to flavor
3 lbs honey
125g craisins (for secondary)
Half packet Lalvin 71B yeast (~2.5g)
Both the apple and cranberry juices were from Costco, and the apple juice was their opaque organic variety. We used Arizona Desert Wildflower for the honey.
Gravity & ABV
Gravity & ABV
Initially, OG reading was 1.160, but after adjusting for dilution introduced during nutrient additions, our effective OG would have been 1.147.
FG was 1.050 after 20 days.
This mead has plenty of sugar to hit 71B's 14% yeast tolerance, but if our dilution calculations were accurate, we finished at 12.84%.
Nutrients
Nutrients
1.5 tsp boiled yeast slurry at pitch
0.5 tsp boiled yeast slurry once a day for the first 4 days.
Offgas the mead before adding nutrients.
Since we're using a budget nutrient solution - boiling some expired yeast we got our hands on for free - we just took our best guess at how much to add. I used an online calculator intende for Fermaid O, and then oversized the feed amounts slightly under the assumption that some of my boiled yeast slurry was water, not nutrients.
You are of course, free to work in better nutrients if that's something you're comfortable with and have available.
Timeline - Pitch to Bottle
Timeline - Pitch to Bottle
Pitched on 05/02/2020
Racked to secondary on 05/23/2020
Added the 125g craisins in secondary in weighted muslin bags for easier removal and to keep them submerged. Make sure to rinse the heck out of your craisins if they came oiled.
Bottled on 06/06/2020
Retrospective
Retrospective
Process Improvement
Process Improvement
We bottled this too soon - as our first brew we were just super eager to try the bottling process at all and call something done. You can already see the difference in clarity between the above left image taken on bottling day and the above right image taken about 2 months later - and the improved clarity was twice as striking in person as I could get it to be in photos. A lot of the haze fell out as sediment, which doesn't really impact the taste, but a lot of people don't like it, which makes me hesitant to gift any such bottles. I will definitely be looking into clarifying agents and waiting longer during secondary for future brews.
Ferment in an oversized primary vessel with slightly over 1 gal of mead. For example, use a 2 gal bucket for primary, and rack into a 1 gal carboy for secondary. This way you don't need a blowoff tube, and won't have issues with headspace in secondary.
On future batches, I'll try add nutrients in a manner that makes dilution negligent. I am not confident we accurately calculated our eOG, since we don't have a particularly precise measurement for our starting volume (we just assumed 1 gal because it fit in the 1 gal carboy).
Recipe Improvements
Recipe Improvements
I would suggest using additional craisins in secondary and completely abandoning cranberry juice. Apparently cranberries aren't super nice to yeast, and this may be why we stopped a little shy of 71B's 14% ABV tolerance. Moving the cranberries to secondary means they aren't in the way of fermentation - and the apple juice dominated our cranberry juice's flavor anyway.
We probably could have used cheaper honey, as the apple and cranberry completely dominate in the end product.
You may want to use additives like pectic enzyme for clarity - the opaque apple juice is delicious, but ends quite hazy with the recipe and process described here.
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