Holy heck, how did you wind up with 300 lbs?

I would love to hear how it goes!!

Amazing taste so far! Made some slight changes (added 1 gal o water and 5 more lbs of honey, longer time with pepper and coco, used long pepper too). It was still so thick my hop filter was too solid for much liquid to get through. Had to pour for the transfer, so hope it didn't get too oxygenated.

Now that it's bottled, this is genuinely the second best mead I've ever made (as told by others whove had it too). Although I changed a few things it's definitely thanks to your base recipe. Recommended this channel to those who asked.

PS the blackberries add a awesome color I love it , I just did a brandy using them and plum jam.but I'm trying something Different after I distilled my mash I put another jar of each into my white dog (it's awesome to drink like that ) to macerate and I'll distill it again hopefully bringing more sweetness , floral aromas and berry flavors through......mite add some blackberry jam again after that just for the color

71B is supposed to be good at handling the "osmotic pressure" (I think I got that term right) created by the high starting gravity. I have done one no-water without 71B, but used an ale yeast that only ferments to ~11% ABV, thus lowering the starting gravity a fair bit to help address the issue Fermaid O is entirely organic nitrogen and we're assuming with this much fruit we've got the organic nitrogen covered already. FermK/DAP are there to provide inorganic sources of nitrogen - Storm's video on nutrition in no-waters is a good place for a more detailed explanation And yeah, not even to plunge the cap. Still makes me nervous but so far it has worked as advertised

You can totally make a mead with fruit juice! It doesn't necessarily remove the fruit cap issue, though - like my Tropical Cider was only fruit juice but I wound up with a cap anyway: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/a9aPdbiUyKuVY30.html And while fruit juice is absolutely viable, it would result in a different product compared to the fruit bomb meads I've made. The tannin development we get from the fruit skins is a quintessential component of the "no water" style of mead. Without it, you would be able to get through primary faster (there's no reason to let it sit on the skins for 4 weeks if there are no skins lol), but you may need to introduce some other ingredients to help balance the fruit acids.

@@ArrowtotheMead Thank you for the response!! You now have a new subscriber. now it time to binge this content lmao

Few reasons, but the main thing is arguably that you want to make sure your yeast have a strong enough colony to outcompete other things such as wild yeast that are likely on the fruit/honey. Batch calculators online will typically suggest how many grams of yeast based on the size of your batch. I err on the side of rounding up since more yeast won't hurt anything unless you use an unrealistically ridiculous amount (like 1lb/gal; I did a video on that lol)

Eeehhhhh - I mean, the 2021 Mead Stampede first place traditional that went on to win *Best of Show* was a dry mead, haha I think sweet meads are more popular across the community - so judges simply receive a lot more sweet entries, and many of those come from brewers with a lot of sweet mead experience! Odds are high some of 'em will be fantastic.

@@ArrowtotheMead Is that the exception that proves the rule? :) Most meads sent being sweet makes sense, I saw a Mead Stampede judges comments video and I think the biggest comment there was "sweetness would he,p to round it up"...

@@roman9509 I mean - mayyyybe, but I think *best of show* is a pretty major exception!