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Source: Dick Dunn
Mead Lover's Digest #171, 10 July, 1993
Ingredients:
- 6 lbs clover honey
- 4 lbs alfalfa honey
- 12 lbs strawberries
- Red Star Prise de Mousse yeast
- 4 oz dextrose (bottling)
- Start the yeast in about a pint of water with a few tablespoons of dextrose. Be sure the starter solution and jar are sterile, and at 70-80 F before adding yeast. This yeast should start quickly--a few hours at most.
- Clean and hull the strawberries; chop into a few pieces. (Don't crush them or you'll have an impossible mess at racking.) Put them into a sanitized plastic-pail primary.
- Bring 4 gallons of water to a full boil. Remove from heat and immediately add the honey; stir thoroughly. (This will sterilize the honey without cooking the flavor out of it.) Cool to about 150-160 F, pour over the berries in the primary fermenter. Cool to pitching temperature (below 80 F) and add yeast starter. Stir thoroughly to mix and aerate.
- Every day or two, push the floating mass of strawberries down into the fermenting mead (the equivalent of a winemaker's `punching down the cap').
- After the strawberries have become very pale--probably ten days or more--strain out as much of the strawberry mass as possible, then rack into a glass carboy. Be prepared for the racking tube to clog. (A stainless `Chore Boy' over the bottom end of the tube will help.)
- Ferment to completion. If necessary, fine with gelatin. Prime with the 4 oz (by weight) of dextrose dissolved in water; bottle using crown caps.
- 12 lbs strawberries in a 5-gallon batch seemed like a lot at first, but it has worked out right. This gives a pronounced strawberry nose and taste, nothing subtle about it. You could use as much as 15 lbs (3 lbs/gallon) of fruit. I used frozen strawberries...naturally, these are mushier and more likely to create pulp that's hard to manage in the primary, but they also release juice more readily.
- The blend of honey was intended to be such as not to mask the strawberry flavor. This turned out not to be an issue; you could shift the balance more toward the alfalfa or other stronger honey.
- Keep in mind that strawberries don't have a lot of sugar in them. They contribute flavor but not much fermentable.
- The mead fermented out in about eight weeks. I have no real idea what the true starting gravity was; it's just not possible to get a useful number with the fruit in it. It finished at 0.991.
- We were serving the mead and getting good reviews at sixteen weeks from the start of fermentation (eight weeks after bottling). After almost a year from start, the strawberry character is still holding true.