When I was at a friend's wedding last summer I found out that the bride's parents had bee hives and were giving away small jars of honey to the guests. During the reception the day after I was able to mooch some of this honey off of the bride and had planned to make it into an anniversary mead once I felt that I had enough feedback and experience. I had tasted the JOAM and Jalapeno meads in January, and even though they were still pretty young I felt that they had progressed well enough that I would be able to start this without wasting the honey. The only issue was that I didn't have a source in town for the yeast I wanted to try (Lalvin 71B) nor the nutrients needed to help the ferment along (Fermaid K and Go-Ferm).
It took me until the end of March to find everything that I needed, I had no luck online and ended up sourcing some from a local wine u-brew shop. Here is the recipe used:
4.5L Glass jug
Tap water left out overnight for the chlorine to evaporate
1.647kg of honey (it had crystallized quite a bit so I warmed it up in the sink with hot water)
Lalvin 71B yeast
Go-Ferm in the yeast re-hydration water
1/8 teaspoon of Fermaid K after lag time and a day after lag time
1/16 teaspoon of DAP
SG: 1.078
I was hoping to get a higher SG, the recommendation that is given as a standard on the home brew talk forums is 3 to 3.5 lbs (1.36 to 1.58kg) of honey for each imperial gallon for a target SG of 1.090. At the time that I made this I thought that was for the US gallon and upscaled the recipe for that. Only, the honey ended up having more water in it and the SG wasn't nearly as high as I hoped. When I rack this in a few months I think that I'm going to try and add some more honey to it in order to raise the gravity and so that I don't have to top off with water.
My digital scale isn't accurate enough to measure out the grams necessary for the nutrients so I tried to guess how much would be correct. I didn't read this until after the fact, but the one book that I have with mead recipes in it lists 1 teaspoon as the amount a nutrient needed. I ended up adding some more after the first week to try and make up for the difference.
Right now it appears that it has started to clear, I would like to take a gravity reading. But I still need to find a good way of taking one from a jug that doesn't end up reducing the final amount so much. A gravity reading takes from 150ml to 200ml or so. And when you only have 4500ml of liquid readings and rackings can quickly diminish the amount of final product.
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