Recent content by seth8530

Whew! After a couple hours of work I manged to get three of these guys into kegs. The dry mead finished at 0.998, which means these guys are likely right around 7.5% ABV. I back sweetened one of them to 1.020 for a semi-sweet to sweet mead and I backsweetened the strawberry mead up to 1.030...

Its great to be back at it again. I feel ya. I finished school a couple of years ago and things got a lot better after that.

Racked to secondary. Gravity was around 1.008 so it still has a bit to go. Here is a picture of the strawberry mead with around 12 lbs of berries.

Gravity is now at 1.040. Going to go ahead and add the rest of the nutrient in.

2lbs 14 oz is pretty darn close by my reckoning. But I feel your pain. I would not of had this problem if i was not using a silly digital bathroom scale. To me I figured eh 5.5 percent 7 percent. Both would make me happy so I went with it. If I was really confident about my volume I could have...

Got this guy going with a buddy tonight. Thus far we are following the plan pretty well except it took around 2.9 gallons of honey to hit our target of 32 lbs of honey. Volume should be pretty close to 26 gallons. Original gravity is measured at 1.056 via refractomater. We should have measured...

Ageability depends on the kind of mead you are making. Lower ABV meads if made right (5-8)% can have a pretty quick turn around 1-2 months. As was alluded to before the goal of aging is not to make up for a flawed fermentation but to allow the mead to come together. With my mine strength meads I...

I am back at making session mead again. The plan is to have one 26 gallon batch of mead and split it into 4 six gallon sub batches. ABV will be kept low to encourage a faster turn around and also to deliver a fresh and refreshing taste. The last batch I tried to make I ended up using too much...

I racked this guy to carboy a few weeks back. He seems pretty happen and no obvious off flavors. Time will tell how this guy turns out.

This guy is crawling on along. We just hit 1.070 added the rest of the fermaidO and I turned the heat back up to 60F from 57.

Took a while to get out of lag phase. I had to warm it up to 65F. However, we got a nice head now. I went on and added 17 grams of fermaidK to it. Around 1.070 I will add the rest of the fermaidO. So far it has a very nice and floral smell.

Nope, nothing special. I would tune your batch size so that once you rack out of primary you can fill the carboy all the way up.

You need containers for aging which prevent oxygen ingress. Most people use carboys (generally in the 5 to 6 gallon size) or kegs. With most any mead most of the time is spent aging and not fermenting. I suggest you go for a 5 to 6 gallon batch size.

You plan on making 3 gallons. What do you plan on aging it in? Also, do you have enough nutrient? Generally with go ferm you use 1.25 the mass of go ferm as the mass of yeast you use. Leme know if you want some pointers.

Alright, honey is nice and mixed up. Nutrient addition is going to plan so far. Initial gravity is 1.103 once temperature corrected. Must is at around 88 degrees right now. Gonna wait a bit for it to cool off before I pitch.