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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