I finally started the blueberry melomel I want to enter into the Canadian Sasquatch competition. It was much more work than I anticipated, but only because I wanted to video the whole process and start up my YouTube channel for mead making.
Of course, recording everything is time consuming, and trying to remember all the steps as it is, and then making sure I captured it on camera, is a pain in the ass. But I think I got everything, and now just need to edit it into a cohesive and intelligible video. Still, I forgot how much fun it isn't to record everything.
The hardest part was figuring out the conversions. Since I went with 3 gallons instead of 5, I needed to figure out how much water I actually needed. Using MeadMakr's BatchBuildr calculator, I was originally supposed to use 7.5 lbs. of honey, but got confused on just how much water that meant I was supposed to take out. In the end, I accidentally substituted adding that much honey rather than taking out the water, which ended up using all the honey.
What the calculator said was 7.49 lbs. of honey which I calculated to be 14.4 cups of water to be removed. Instead, what I did was attempt to put in 14.4 cups of honey. 10 lbs only came to about 13 or so cups, at which time I realized my error. Honey weighs 3/4 lbs per cup, so for 7.5 lbs of honey, I should have added about 10-3/4 cups of honey.
Of course, this just means I'll probably have a sweeter mead since, to account for the extra honey I had to remove more water, or around 1-1/4 gallons in total. However, it didn't seem to quite all add up properly.
The stainless steel pot I was using is a 2.5 gallon pot. Somehow I thought it was bigger. But I placed one gallon of spring water in the pot, and after warming up the two 5-lb. containers of honey in a sink full of hot water to liquify it, poured it into the pot and stirred with a mixer for about 5 minutes. I then added what I thought was the appropriate amount of water, minus a half cup to mix in the yeast, which brought it right up to the brim. At the time, I didn't realize it was a 2.5-gallon pot, but decided to measure how much must was in there and that's when I discovered I was coming up short for what I needed.
I subsequently transferred the must into the 5 gallon plastic bucket I'm using as the primary fermenter and then added extra water to bring it up to 3 gallons. With a starting gravity of 1.108, that seems like the appropriate volume, but it was a bit confusing. I'll need to pay more attention next time, maybe write everything out first rather than afterwards.
The yeast was pitched, I added a 1/4 tsp. of energizer and a 1/2 tsp. of DAP to the must, swirled it all around and placed a lid on it with an airlock. Hopefully tomorrow I'll remember to degas the must and add more nutrients.
UPDATE: As I was closing down all the windows that were open on my computer, I looked at the BatchBuildr calculations again and realized I actually should have used 2 packages of yeast, not one. Apparently increasing the amount of honey necessitated more yeast so I went and pitched another package of D47 yeast.
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