I wondered if anybody had any tips about using cranberries in secondary?

I plan on doing a session mead (~5% abv) and racking on top of frozen cranberries. I heard that fermentation with this fruit can be tricky but I wonder if that applies when its used at this step.

Thanks in advance for your help!

I added a Camden tablet, crushed up and the day later added potassium sorbet. I just transferred it over to my secondary vessel to cold crash before bottling. And the airlock on my secondary vessel is bubbling. Did I mess up? This is my first mead so I’m a bit confused.

I've been brewing for a couple of years now, slowly progressing from "It's Drinkable" to "I'd gift it to friends". I think I've hit my first "I'd go out of my way to buy that"! My personal reserve is down to 5 bottles after friends had a taste

The nose reminds me of a freshly peeled apple, and the taste has those bright apple/honey notes followed by an oaked/vanilla/rich honey finish. Very smooth at 13% and sweet, but not overdoing it.

This is a fairly simple sweet traditional made using NSW Bloodwood Honey + 71B + water... Nothing too crazy, but it has taken 3 attempts to really nail both the recipe and the process.

I've found with this honey that the final flavour is heavily dependent on brewing with the honey, rather than backsweeting at the end. This made previous attempts without temperature control vary wildly especially in QLD/AUS.

• First attempt ended early due to the heat at 1.043, tasty but not what I was after
• Second attempt went long and ended at 1.008, I tried the backsweetening here to 1.020, but it lost a lot of its character... Took on a more generic honey taste
• This attempt, sticking to 20c netted me the sweetspot between the two at 1.027

This one was brewed in a ~10L batch, sat in primary for about a month, then racked to sit on an American oak spiral for a whole year.

Recipe without the waffle:

• ~4kg of NSW Bloodwood Honey
• ~6L spring water (to target 1.126 OG)
• 10g of Lalvin 71B
• Fermaid-O following TOSNA 2.0
• Primary lasted ~1mth
• Racked onto medium toast American Oak for 12mths
• No clarifying agents used
• Stabilised and bottled in the affordable and stylish Ikea 500ml swingtops

Finally, I'm getting around to make the famous Viking Blod and try doing a Guinness Braggot

VIKING BLOD

1kg natural honey + water

2.5L cherry and white grape juice

1.3L Hibiscus and mint

5g yeast

Total 5.1L

O.G 1.106

------‐---------------

GUINNESS BRAGGOT

1kg natural honey + water

8x440ml cans of non-alcoholic Guinness beer

5g yeast

Total 4.8L

O.G 1.054

Three gallons of base mead. 1.106 SG. I'm thinking a dragon fruit hibiscus 🌺 mead or Heather honey back sweetened traditional.

There isnt much flavour left, and it is a bit harsh alcohol flavour. Will giving it time in a bottle in the closet fix the flavour? How do i improve the flavour? I added some frozen fruit pulp (second fermentation) and i think it sent the yeast into overdrive, and now i got a bit of a dry slightly bitter wine (not unpleasant bitter). Was hoping for a more cassis flavor

I just started my first traditional mead about 2 hours ago (first picture) and now it looks like a collection of a bunch of stuff at the bottom of the carboy (lees? Dead yeast?).

Im really worried and would love to have to help with figuring out what's going on and if i need to do anything to fix it.

Ingredient specifications:

- Batch Size: 2.3 Gallons

- Honey: S&J Produce Farmers Market, 6lbs total + 0.6lbs of store bought "Nate's 100% pure raw honey"

- Yeast: 5g of Lalvin D47, rehydrated in ~6.5g of go-ferm in ~125mL boiled water, cooled to ~104°F

- Starting Gravity: ~1.095

This was then split from my 5 gallon bucket to a 1 gallon carboy and a 2 gallon bucket, put into my temperature controlled fridge.

I've kept my fridge around 65 - 66°, as ive seen that's the ideal temp for Lalvin D47.

After about 2 hours, all this stuff settled at the bottom of both containers. I just shook them, sadly forgot to take a picture before shaking. The layer at the bottom of the 1 gallon glass carboy was about an inch and a half thick.

Help please!

I got a homebrew kit for mead this year in February. My first batch of mead (start of ferment was Feb 18, ferment ended on about March 17) turned out incredible sulfur heavy, despite following the directions for the water, honey, sanitization and yeast nutrient (adding nutrients on days 2 and 5). Aging has not helped one bit with this batch.

My second batch (start of ferment was Sept 16, ferment ended on about Oct 16) also smells and tastes strongly of sulfur despite splash racking, but nowhere near as bad as batch 1. I've used Lalvin D47 for both meads and used raw wildflower honey. My gravity reading at the end of Batch 2 was reading near 0, even though I can taste alcohol in the batch. Both batches were kept between 62 and 69 degrees F.

Does anyone have an idea of where I might be going wrong? I desperately want to make this more of a hobby but after 2 months of 2 failed projects, I don't know what to do.

Pretty excited about the newest mead I’ve made! I was at a ren faire and found a vender called 559 Honey, and they had different flavors. The samples were amazing!

I got two, one was their orange/lemon and another was huckleberry. So far, these flavors came out super well in the mead and even though the huckleberry is still very young, it’s got a gorgeous red color.

Citrus recipe-
3lbs orange honey from 559 Honey
1 gallon water
K1-V1116 yeast (one packet)
Fed the first three days with Fermaid

For the other, exact same recipe but with 3lbs of their huckleberry honey.

I am making my second fermentation ever and am curious what yeast to use. I am making a Orange Blossom honey traditional and don't know which yeast to use to best capture all of those flavors.

The yeast i have avaliable to me are: K1V-1116, D-47, 71b, and EC-1118.

I do have the ability to make a tempature controller chamber if needed, but I am nervous about picking a yeast that might need a bit more help as Ive never dealt with nutrients before. Though, I do have GoFerm and Fermaid-O avaliable.

Please help me decide, thanks!

Hey AZ Mead tribe! We have a trial run at Costco the Fri-Sun weekends of 10/31 (Scottsdale on Hayden), 11/6 (Tempe), 11/13 (Gilbert), and 12/4 (N. Phoenix on Beardsley) from 10am to 6pm or until we sell out and we would love your support if you are in the Valley and enjoy our local Mead! Come by and say hi and grab a few bottles of our Unicorn Blood Mead at a silly low price and let's show them that it belongs on their shelves permanently!

Much love and happy fermenting!

Larry was kind enough to give them a home on the wiki: https://wiki.meadtools.com/en/recipes/historical

These are close translations, not modernized. No batch sizes, no nutrient schedules, just what the cook or cellar master wrote down back then. There’s a hopped sage mead, the old french bochet, a spiced cherry mead, one where you add water until an egg floats, and a rose and laurel berry mead.

The intro page explains how to read them and what yeast they actually used. Spoiler: they didn’t just wait for wild yeast.

i spent quite a while translating and checking these against the original manuscripts. If you brew one, let me know how it turned out.

I keep seeing that pH seems to be important, but is there any way to measure it other than buying a $100 pH meter? A lot of people say to not get test strips.

If it stalls can I just add something to raise the pH a bit until fermentation starts again?

The German shepherd is half traditional with green tea and lemon and half pomegranate melomen with Taifi Flowes 11.15%

The chihuahua is half traditional with orange peel and ginger and half pomegranate melomen with vanilla and Taifi Flowers 12%

Taif is a city in my country

Just finished fermentation and used potassium sorbate so I can sweeten. But before I was about to transfer into another bottle, i noticed some things cloudy layer and some ring around the next of the bottle. What is any of this?

Making my first mead. Does like look right? I added apples and pears about a week ago and the mead is on day 21.

1.4kg Tesco bought Hilltop blossom honey

1.081 FG

1kg raw Local Honey Man honey + ~350g of slightly mushed Clementines, with skins

1.049 FG

Both have 5g of Lalvin EC-1118 yeast and a teaspoon of Young's Yeast Nutrients

Surprised the raw honey produced a low FG reading. Is this likely to increase as the yeast draws out the sugars from the clementines?

Im planning to make a mango spice mead. I was thinking about using red pepper. But there are a few questions coning up.

1. Should i use blended mango, heated and mashed or whole fruit? (Maybe even dried)

2. Primary, secondary or both?

3. How many red peppers for 5 liters?

4. Side question: what part of your batch is normally fruit (juice)?. I normally use 1.5-2kg for a 5 Liter batch.

Hi, i just did my first batch, followed instructions like a good student and so on... But i cannot for the life of me understand any of those sites to calculate mead ABV or nutrients etc

So i simply followed my heart until now, i would like to know how much alcohol is in my batch!

I did measure it during fermentation, but while i was bottling then the hydrometer would just sink to the bottom, like with water?? Did i lose all my alcohol?

FIRST MEASURE: 110°

SECOND: 90°

THIRD: 50°

FOURTH: 20°

FIFTH:20°

It would not go past and ferment anymore so i stopped fermentation anyway to be sure

STOPPER FERMENT AND ALSO WHILE BOTTLING: SINK

Recipe was 3.75 water, 2kgs honey and 3gr yeast, 5gr stop fermenter and bentonite

It’s about 10 days into fermentation.

I bottled my cranberry mead (used bottled cranberry juice not sure which brand) and found these dark specks floating once I got to the end. It was aging for a year at this point and the air lock never went dry and I never had to refill it. It looks great in the bottles but I don't want anything to be wrong with it before I give it as a gift.

Lubéron Honey, ginger, cloves, maniguette ( grain of paradise). 11,3%

Apéritif is a small snacks and drinks before the actual dinner in France . Is there a similar tradition where you live ?

There is some foam going to my airlock. Is this normal. Is there anything I can do?