[crynski]

One of the things I love about you guys is whatever ideas I might have, you have already done it. 
I want to try some mead and plan on going in 2 wildly different directions with it. 
First I want to put away a one gallon traditional mead for when my guy comes home.  He drinks hard liquor not really into beer, and he just got deployed so I have a year to get his celebration beverage ready.  He has requested still, and semi sweet.  I plan on using the basic article here, and the one someone posted from homebrewtalk. 
The stuff I am more interested in making for myself is a fruity low alcohol "meadcooler" I was going to start with the Short Mead recipe I read in SPEEDBREWING (strawberry pepper, but I was going to ditch the pepper for personal preference).  But I was reading the most recent cyster thread and got a head full of ideas, and raised a couple questions. 
What yeast do you like for a lower ABV mead, or cyster?
Will a straight raspberry short mead be too tart? will I need to balance the tartness with something else added?
What other fruits are we forgetting? I see the berries well represented, apple cider, but what about stone fruit, or a pear cider in place of apple?  Speaking of Pear cider, if you don't press your own where do you get your juice?

[pete b]

Others can give you more info on the low abv meads as I haven't gone that route yet. What I do is actually simply mix a regular mead with soda water on the summer or make sangria with mead. We also make a summer pre dinner drink with a light mead like peach with gin and campari.
Strawberry mead is tough because the taste of strawberries doesn't come through very well. But you can do it if you use a ridiculous amount of super fresh super ripe strawberries. I imagine you could use high quality frozen strawberries but I enjoy using fresh fruit in season. As far as tartness goes you actually need to add some acid to make strawberries pop. That's one reason strawberry rhubarb pie is a thing. There are acidifying products or you could simply use lemon juice or make strawberry rhubarb mead.
As far as stone fruit goes we make peach, plum, and cherry.  With the exception of cherry the same problem with strawberry applies and the same remedy of using a ton of very ripe fruit appliies. We are blessed with prolific peach trees and make some lovely peach mead. I have only made pear mead with juiced whole fruit so I don't know where people get juice otherwise but I do know with pear s subtle flavor you want 100% of the must to be pear juice, no water.