Continuing on my theme of making mead again, we had a huge harvest of Montmorency Cherries this year so I decided to make a mead with them.

Recipe

• 5lbs clover honey
• 1lb local blackberry honey
• 1lb wildflower honey from my hives
• ~4g Lalvin K1V-1116
• 3.8g Fermaid Go-Ferm
• 9.6g Fermaid-O
• 1gal fresh frozen Montmorency cherries
• 1L tart cherry juice

Data

SG: 1.072 (This is just the honey component, I did not calculate SG changes from the juice or cherries)
FG: 1.002
ABV: 9.2%
pH: 3.36
Ferm Temp: 60-70F (ambient in fermenting room)

Steps

The honey was dissolved the honey in heated water as it was heavily crystallized, and filtered tap water was added to make a final volume of 3.5 gallons.

100ml of 50c water was used to dissolve 3.8g of Fermaid GoFerm. Yeast was added to the mixture after its temperature dropped below 40C.

The yeast/nutrient slurry was pitched and then I heavily aerated the must.

I will be following this nutrition schedule which is based on the TOSNA formulas.

Nutrition Schedule:
0hrs 3.8g Fermaid Go-Ferm
24hrs 2.4g Fermaid-O
48hrs 2.4g Fermaid-O
72hrs 2.4g Fermaid-O
6 days 2.4g Fermaid-O

June 20 2025 - Signs of heavy fermentation are present, the current must temp is 64F.

June 21 2025 - Added the first nutrient addition late, forgot to add it last night at the 24 hour mark so it got added at 730AM. Fermentation is extremely active, adding the nutrient addition caused the expected foam explosion in the fermenter.

I added the 1L of tart cherry juice at around 7PM. It provided a really nice change in color which was the main goal.

June 22 2025 Decided to just stick with the offset nutrition schedule and added 2.4g of Fermaid-O at 730AM.

June 23 2025 Added 2.4g of Fermaid-O at 9AM

June 24 2025 Added the final 2.4g of Fermaid-O at 11AM.

July 9 2025 I waited until primary fermentation was complete before adding the cherries. I've kept them frozen since harvesting them from my tree. Freezing allowed me to delay the brew, as well as lyse the cell walls allowing for greater juice and flavor extraction from the cherries. They were not pitted prior to adding to the mead.

In order to protect the mead since it is a bit lower alcohol and I want it to be able to be aged, I pasteurized the cherries. I ran them in a sous vide water bath for 2 hours at 144F.

Fermentation had visibly restarted about 1 hour after adding the cherries and their juice.

July 16 The cherries are losing a lot of their color and are starting to turn more shades of yellow. It's coming along nicely and all secondary fermentation appears to have completed.

July 21 I pulled a sample of the mead and it is coming along very nicely. It has a lovely pink color and tastes like bright cherries. It has no notes of alcohol or off-flavors that we could detect. I will be racking off the cherries in the next week or so (depending on arrival of new sterile siphon setup).

July 24 I tasted it again and there has been no change in the cherry flavor, so I've decided to rack it into secondary for some bulk aging.

I transferred using a new to me method, sterile transfer, using CO2 pressure to push through the racking can into the CO2 filled secondary fermetner.

I also added K-Meta shortly after racking.

Aug 19 I pulled samples to test the SG and the pH. Since fermentation is definitely finished, and the pH is sufficiently low, I decided to go ahead and bottle. (I had unfortunately mixed up the start dates for this in my head and had intended on bulk aging in secondary for another 2 months at least)

I setup my new sterile CO2 forced siphon setup and started bottling. Unfortunately, I had the pressure way too high for the first 8 bottles and ended up essentially force carbonating them. I continued bottling the remainder at a much lower CO2 pressure and had no issues.

I borrowed a vacuum wine storage device from my neighbor and used it to degas the carbonated bottles.

After all was done, I ended up with 9 375mL and 16 750mL bottles.