[billmiller324]

So I have been making beer and wine for a little while now and been thinking about making an authentic mead does anyone have any good recipes

[BrodyR]

So I have been making beer and wine for a little while now and been thinking about making an authentic mead does anyone have any good recipes

What I've been doing lately is filling up a cooler with water (5 gallons or so) then adding honey and periodically taking gravity readings until I'm where I want to be. If it's a semi-sweet/sweet mead I'm going for I check the yeasts alcohol tolerance and make sure I bump my gravity up above it.

Then I stir, transfer to a bucket, pitch some rehydrated dry yeast, and the first dose of nutrients. The mead tips available on the AHA helped a lot - monitoring pH and adjusting if need be as well as doing a staggered nutrient addition have resulted in a lot better mead for me.

My current batch is D47, Orange Blossom Honey, and currently sitting in the secondary dry at 8%. Not really a ton of flavor dry at that % so I've been tossing around the idea of adding some tart cherry juice or just adding honey directly to the serving keg to back sweeten.

Definitly start by reading the AHA articles if you haven't already:

http://www.homebrewersassociation.org/how-to-brew/mead/mead-making-tips/
http://www.homebrewersassociation.org/how-to-brew/mead/making-mead/
http://www.homebrewersassociation.org/homebrew-recipe/tradition-dry-varietal-mead/

[hopfenundmalz]

You can look up the Gold medal winning recipes here.
http://wiki.homebrewersassociation.org/AHA-National-Homebrew-Competition-Winners-Circle

[billmiller324]

Thanks appreciate the feed back

[beersk]

I think mead almost always has to be backsweetened if you don't want it dry. It's hard to get it to finish where you want to get the right amount of sweetness. Then again, the addition of fruit really helps, if potassium sorbate is used to keep it from fermenting the fruit after you add it to secondary.
I've yet to make a mead with Orange Blossom, but it sounds really good.