Overview

An experimental mead. Going to try and keep it sweet, adding ginger for some bite, and planning on carbonating and keeping on a keg. Looking for something pretty drinkable to keep on tap. To keep it sweet I plan on monitoring gravity until it drops down to about 1.020 (or a little sweeter then tastes good) then putting it into the fridge at a very cold temp for a few days to get the yeast to drop out. Then I'll rack it to secondary, add ginger, and sulfite it to prevent further yeast growth.

Ingredients

2.25 gallons of tap water
8 pounds of raw Blackberry Honey, purchased from Bob's Homebrew
2 Campden tablets
Yeast nutrient, 1tsp
D-47 yeast, two packages, no starter

Notes

9/19/2005 - Made must, added camped tablets. OG of 1.095
9/20/2005 - Added yeast, two packages, and yeast nutrient
9/23/2005 - Took a gravity reading. SG of 1.084. From watching things it looks like fermentation really didn't take off until yesterday.

12/8/2005 - Just noticed that I missed most of my note taking. Doing this by memory. Sometime in early Nov I racked the mead to secondary (I think SG was down around 1.025 at this point) and chilled it down to around 40F for a week to try and get the yeast to drop out of suspension. Then I racked it again to a keg. A couple of days later (Thanksgiving) I added ginger. I used about a lb of ginger (weight before peeling). The ginger was not super fresh, it had been sitting in my kitchen for a few weeks. I peeled it and cut it into very thin slices and put it into a hop bag and added that to the keg. I need to measure FG, but there is still a good amount of residual sweetness. It has clarified very well for not using any clearing agents. I never sulfited it.

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