Strawberry Dry-Hopped Sack Mead

[Richard]

Finally got my honey, so here we go again...

Ingredients:

• 20lbs non-pasteurised honey.
• 1 cup lemon juice - the bottled stuff (ascorbic + citric acid)
• 3 tsp Yeast Nutrient (blend including yeast hulls).
• 3lbs strawberry puree.
• 3oz of Fuggles pellets.
• Enough water to make the above fill a 6 gallon carboy with a few inches of headspace.
• Lalvin 1118.
• 6 Campden Tablets
• 3 tsp K-sorbate.

Method:

• Sanitise 6 gallon "wine bucket", and large plastic spoon.
• Pour honey in bucket.
• Add cold water to make to 6 gallons (yup; really trying to keep the honey flavour in place this time)
• Add the yeast nutrient.
• Add the lemon juice.
• Pitch yeast.
• Wait until visible fermentation has stopped.
• Add strawberry puree to primary, shake everything up.
• Wait again for fermentation to stop.
• Rack to secondary.
• Wait a month or two
• Stabilise with 6 campden tablets and 3 teaspoons of K-sorbate.
• Back-sweeten to 1.010.
• Add dry-hopping; wait two weeks.
• Fine.
• Bottle.

OG should be about 1.120, fg pre-backsweetening should be about 1.0. Total ABV 14-15%.

[Dean]

I would like to try this ....it sounds good!

[Richard]

OG on this was 1.130. If I'm doing my numbers right, that should pretty much push the 1118 to its absolute limits. I have a feeling this one will take a _while_ to age.

So... brew club meeting in 2015 I'm sure you can have some

[Richard]

These brews already have character. One of them is lazy (just putting out a little CO2 - "Do I have to?") and the other is aggressive (blew the airlock off coating the vicinity in a sticky honey/yeast mix). Beats me why the difference, as the base recipe for both is the same...


There is a visible wavefront of bubbles moving down the carboy, which makes me wonder - at a certain gravity, would bottom fermenting (e.g. wine) yeast turn into top/middle-fermenting 'cause it can't sink further yet?