Begin Brewing!

Yesterday, I brewed a Passion Fruit Milkshake IPA.  In the process of doing so, I opened a container of natural passion fruit flavoring I had purchased.  Since I didn't want that to go to waste, and I had been wanting to make a Passion Fruit flavored mead anyway, I decided to put that together while I was in the brewing area working on something else. Ingredients 5 pounds of Wildflower Honey 2.9 ounces of Amoretti Natural Passion Fruit Flavoring 0.5 tsp. Fermaid K 0.5 tsp. DAP 1 packet Lalvin K1V 1116 dry yeast Spring water to the 2-gallon level in the fermenter This should yield a melomel with the following qualities: Batch Size: 2.0 gallons (1.87 gallons, approximately, in fermenter) Original Gravity: 1.075 SG estimated (1.108 SG actual) Final Gravity: 0.984 SG estimated ABV: 12.3% Fermenter:   Yoda Bottling Wand: Stainless 2 Carbonation Method:  none for part of the batch, 4 Brewer's Best conditioning tablets (medium carbonation) for ...

While shopping in a Wal-Mart a couple of months ago, I decided it might be fun to try making a strawberry mead.  I picked two items off the shelf to combine with water, yeast nutrient, and yeast to produce the mead. After the mead finished fermenting, the strawberry flavor became minimal or non-existent. This may be in part due to the high attenuation of the yeast used, which dried the mead out completely.  If I did this again, I would use a less attenuative yeast and more of the strawberry preserves.  That is not to say this isn't a good mead. It's just dried to the point that any strawberry character is imperceptible, at least to me.  It finishes more like a dry white wine. Ingredients 1.5 gallons of tap water 5 pounds of Generic Honey 27 ounce jar of Welch's All-Natural Strawberry Preserves 2 tsp. DAP 2 tsp. Wyeast Yeast Nutrient 2 packages Crossmyloof Mead Yeast Just these, water, yeast, and nutrients... Characteristics of this batch: Batch V...