Wild Mountain Honey Strawberry Mead

They just had a sale on Strawberries at the Local Grocery store. Although I typically prefer local BC Grown Strawberries over the California counterparts, I did manage to find some very sweet smelling large deep red berries in the pile. I immediately grabbed 8 Pounds of them.

Awhile back, I also stumbled across a booth selling organic Honey and picked up a couple of pails of Unpastuerized mountain wild flower Honey. It is a beautifully thick and deep yellow honey with a sweeter and richer taste than the Clover Honey I usually use.

So now that I have given you the history of the ingredients in this batch of Strawberry Mead, let's move onto making Mead.



I cleaned and weighed out the strawberries and put them in a large stainless steel pot with 1.5 Litres of Spring water and the Citric Acid & Honey. while heating up the mixture, I crushed the strawberries with a hand crusher thingy (Sort of like a pastry cutter.) All the recipe's I found said to hand crush, I am assuming this is to keep the must chunky. Heating the mixture up, just to disolve the honey I then transfered the must to my 2 Gallon primary fermenter and added water to bring the level up.
I then checked the Specific Gravity and found it to be right around 1.091 which would bring the Mead to a 12% Alc level if left to ferment to dry.

I prepared and dumped in 2 packages of Lalvin K1-V116 Yeast, which I'm told is a Mead Yeast and let it sit on my fridge (Nice and warm.)

I did not have any yeast nutrient left, so I figured I would try it au-natural...well sort of.

Ingredients:

6 lbs strawberries
4 Tsp Citric Acid
4.5 litres water
7 cups unpasteurized wild mountain honey

spec gravity
1.091

1 Package of Lalvin K1-V1116

The Must was innoculated at 5PM PST on April 29th, 2008

See ya in a few days.