Strawberry Mel Part Deaux!

As some of you may remember I made a strawberry melomel quite some time ago. Well after brewing for months it looked like this.

Not exactly appetizing right?

 Well I was reading some posts around the web when someone mentioned pectic enzyme. I already had some since  I had used it for other meads but not this one. Well I dumped some in and shook it around and in 48 hours I got this.

HUGE change.

 I let it sit for a few more days to make sure all the gunk fell to the bottom. Once the weekend hit I went ahead and bottled it. You can see it below. It is the one of the right. The one on the left is an upcoming post..:)

After tasting it I must say, I did a pretty good job with this one. The strawberry flavor is strong in this one. I am going to be excited to try this one in 6-12 months. I bet age will do it wonders. 

Strawberry Mel

Almost a week and No Post?! I blame The Wife. Any who this was supposed to be for "Mead Monday" but eh close enough.

The problem with making mead is that you have to wait to drink it. What is a mazer to do? MAKE MORE MEAD :)

Since I am still new to mead making I decided to go the easy route and make a JOAV. It is a variation of the mead recipe that I made before.

Ingredients:
3 1/2 lbs Clover or your choice honey or blend (will finish sweet) 
3Lbs of strawberries
1 lemon, peeled. 
1 small handful of raisins (25 if you count but more or less ok) 
1 stick of cinnamon 1 allspice berry
1 teaspoon of Fleishmann’s bread yeast 
Balance water to one gallon

For-notes: 
First thing you need to do is to sanitize everything. It is not pictured but  I left a sink bath with some bleach and let all items soak for 30 mins, then heavily rinsed.

The fruit should be frozen beforehand. If you are using frozen, that is fine, if fresh, freeze them solid the night before. It helps the yeast break the fruit down better. 

Below is the cutting up of the strawberries to go into the carboy. Anime playing in the background on The Wife's phone is optional. 

This was rather tiring

 I added the lemon in there. The reason for the lemon is for the acidity and bitterness. It will help balance out the sugar from the berries and honey.

Warming up and stirring the honey into some spring water on the stove. Make sure not to boil the honey.

This is with the honey/water mixture and all ingredients in.

A close up pic

 NOT PICTURED, ME SHAKING THE CRAP OUT OF IT

Here it is now all nice and foamy with the airlock on it. My solution is vodka.

What I don't have pictured is the aftermath of what happened about two hours later. The experiences mazer's out there probably started snickering when they saw the last pic.

See I was sitting around cooling it, playing skyrim when I decided to check on the mead as I had read it can get a little foamy. If by little they meant it would be foaming out of the airlock then, yes it did get a little foamy. I cleaned the airlock put the vodka in it and put the airlock back on.

Only to have it clogged up 30 mins later. Sigh.......

After trying various techniques, saran wrap with rubber band, letting it rest with top off, I realized it just needed something that allowed all the CO2 to escape. After racking my brains I came up with a rather simple solution.

A balloon.

I quickly found out the one pin hole in a balloon like the other mead was not going to work. It blew up to almost popping, so I poked 10 holes in it and let it sit for two days. 

Well....let me correct myself. I had one balloon, tried to poke holes in it and popped it spraying strawberry matter all over my cabinet.

Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu

The second balloon, I pre-poked then put it on. It still blew up to the size of a soft ball. It took 2.5 days but I finally was able to get the airlock back on. You can see some of the dried matter down the side.

Now the wait till it clears..........maybe I should start a blackberry jaov...............