Recipe adapted from Medium Mead from here: http://www.stormthecastle.com/mead/mead-recipes.htm
I’ve been collecting honey from various markets and apiaries around the place, placing a preference on red gum honey if available. The honey I ended up with was:
1 kg Walkabout Apiary Red Gum
800 g Coles Red Gum
1 kg Murchison Apiary Red Gum (really solid, but didn’t seem crystallised exactly)
2.5 kg Walkabout Apiary Yellow Gum (slightly crystallised)
1 kg Speechly Apiary Yellow Box
10 g Fermol Arôme Plus white wine yeast (which is a double dose)
1.5 tsp WYeast wine yeast nutrient (which is a triple dose)
Total 6.3 kg of honey. Going for a medium mead, but slightly drier than last time, so will top up with a total of 15L water.
Added all honey into the pot, then added 5x 1.7 L loads of boiled water from the kettle, for a total of 8.5 L. Bought up to the boil and skimmed the little bit of foam that formed. Once boil established, immediately turned off the heat, added the lid, and transferred outside to cool overnight.
2015-05-28: Mead had cooled nicely, cool to the touch. Brought in and skimmed some more, then poured into fermenter. Added 3x 1.7 L kettle loads of water, 2 from the hot tap, 1 from cold. Dissolved 10 g yeast and 1.5 tsp yeast nutrient in 1L warm water, left to stand for 20 minutes while aerating the must, then suspended all yeast and pitched, rinsed the jar with 400 mL cold water to bring us up to the desired volume of 15 L of water. Total volume slightly more than 21 L, OG 1.100, 26 degrees C.
2015-06-27: Racked. Gravity 1.050. Still bubbling and cloudy.
2015-07-25: Racked onto 40g dextrose, bottled. Still slightly cloudy.
