Doug's first Mead, part 1

Getting ready to make mean for the first time.

I'll be using a recipe from my friend Andrew Keener:

Recipe

Ingredients:

• 1 gallon (12 lbs) of honey. 
• 6lbs of fresh strawberries. 
• Red star wine yeast. 
• Pectic Enzyme to treat 5 gallons. 
• Yeast nutrient if you want to... not required.

Steps:

Bring about 3 gallons of water up to 160 degrees Fahrenheit in a 6+ gallon pot. Dump all the honey in and cover. Let it hang out for 20 minutes or so. While waiting, puree the strawberries or chop them finely. Put them in a pot and bring it up to 156 degree Fahrenheit stirring occasionally. Cover and let sit for 20 minutes.

Dump honey and strawberries into a 5 gallon fermenter and top off with water to 5 gallons. Pitch yeast when it comes down to an appropriate temperature (for wine yeasts this is usually 80 degress fahrenheit).

Let it ferment for roughly 2 weeks or until it bubbles once every 90 seconds. Then transfer to secondary. The strawberries will have mostly disintegrated so I try to suck up as few of them as possible when transferring.

Then let it sit for another month. If you take gravity reading throughout I usually finish when the gravity gets down to 1.010.

When I bottle I add 3/4 cup of corn sugar. Alternatively you can add 1 cup of honey but I would steep the honey at 156 degrees fahrenheit for 20 minutes in a little hot water before adding it.

My Changes to the Recipe

I'm excited that i have some good Wilmington suburban honey from a friend. I has hoping to make this during strawberry season and use hand picked local strawberries, but I've missed the season.

I have a couple of changes I'm going to make to the process/recipe:

• I'm going to use Campden on the strawberries, rather than heat them. This is on the recommendation from John at Wilmington Homebrew Supply. The idea is that the fruit is more sensitive to heat, and it will change the flavor. 
• I'm going to try "Staggered Nutrient Additions" as described in this BrewingTV Recipe by Curt Stock. The idea here is to make sure the yeast is very healthy and vigorous.
• I may also try some additional yeast pitchings. Can't remember where I saw this, but it seems that the yeast can fall to the bottom, or become inactive. Re-pitching makes sure that the desired yeast remains dominant.
• I'm going to add two vanilla beans to the honey at the very beginning when I'm heating the honey. I love a little vanilla sugar on strawberries. I'll split the beans, scrape the seeds in, and add the whole beans. I've used vanilla beans in other recipes - they tolerate heat well, and their flavor is alcohol-soluble. 

Going to do most of this today, and will try to keep detailed notes as I go.

(see part 2)