Doug's first mead, part 2

(see part 1)

Today

I put the honey in the fermenter and prepped the strawberries today. 

Trying to keep better notes on my processes and ingredients, so here's all the details.

The picture below shows 4 quarts of honey (1 gallon or about 12 pounds), along with a 6 pound bag of frozen strawberries from Costco. 

Ingredients

I prepped the strawberries by blending them with water. They were still partially frozen, so they didn't blend easily. I filled up the blender, and then added water to about the level of the top of the strawberries, the whizzed them up. It took maybe 5 blender fulls to do all the strawberries.

Strawberries in blender

I was shooting for 2 gallons of strawberry puree. In the last, smaller batch, I added two campden tablets to the blender, i.e., 1 tablet per gallon. The puree and campden all went into a large food prep container I got from the kitchen supply store. Then I added spring water to bring it up to two gallons, and stirred it all up. Tin foil over the top, and need to let it sit for 24 hours.

Puree with campden

Got to talk quite a bit with John at Wilmington Homebrew Supply today about the mead. He suggested the campden for the fruit, rather than heating to retain the aroma.

After the puree was done, I put the 4 quarts of honey into a pot on the stove, and used some hot water to rinse out each quart jar. I added enough water to maybe double the volume - about 2 gallons. I stirred it very thoroughly, and heated the honey/water mixture to 160 degrees fahrenheit. The consistency was more like a thick beer wort rather than a thin syrup. I let the mixture sit at this temp for about 25 minutes.

The honey mixture went into my sterilized fermenting bucket. Snapped the lid on with the air lock. That will sit until the puree is ready.

Tomorrow

I plan to use pectic enzymes, so I did some research and found this interesting article (scroll down for English). Based on this article, I'm going to wait 24 hours for the campden to off-gas, then add the enzymes to the puree and let them work for 24 hours. Then I'll add them to the honey, top off to 5 gallons with spring water, then add the first yeast nutrient and pitch the yeast.

Also going to do a "staggered nutrient addition". Based on this article, I'm going to:

• one dose with the yeast
• one dose 24 hours after fermentation begins
• one dose 48 hours after fermentation begins
• one dose 7 days after fermentation begins ( or about 30% of fermentation left, based on gravity)