Fermentation shouldn't take out any tartness...if anything would hide it, sweetness might.

If you ferment it dry, expect the tartness to shine through.

rock on!! fermenting it dry then. d-47 or ec1118 in your opinion? ec1118 will take it lower and dryer than d-47 so I think it would be best.

Nah, you're not going to have any unfermentable sugars in the honey or juice concentrate, so I don't think you'll need the ec-1118.

I'd be more interested in the flavor descriptors, and use that to base my decision. And to me, the D-47 sounds more interesting.

I think either one will produce a good melomel, though. Good luck!

jon, what kind of OG should I be looking for on this?

As high as you want to go...it will potentially ferment down below 1.0 if it goes dry, so you can do some quick calcs and base the OG you want on the yeast's alcohol tolerance.

I think i'm going to shoot for 1.100, which will give me 12-13% abv depending on how low it ferments.

I'll be getting the tart cherry juice on saturday and the yeast tomorrow. i'll prolly get the honey on saturday as well, we will be at whole foods.

I wasn't able to get concentrate so I got 3 32 oz jugs of 100% tart cherry juice. I used the sugar info on the nutrition panel and ran it through qbrew. 0.85# of sugar from the juice, 3# of honey in a 1.5 gallon batch gets me to 1.096.

A couple questions - I just did the sugar amounts as corn sugar, did I do it right? Will 96 oz of juice be enough to get the tart flavor I want or should I run this down to a 1 gal batch and use less honey?

What I'd do is not add any water to the batch. Just add honey to the juice, and you'll get that tart cherry taste you're after.

3/4 of a gallon from juice and add 1-2 lbs of honey, or whatever you need to hit your target gravity.

And I'd add the sugar as sucrose by weight. Corn sugar tends to hold onto water more than sucrose, so that's factored into the weight. In theory, sucrose should be more accurate.

sucrose isn't an option in qbrew, can i use invert sugar or something else? I'm not too worried...it'll be close. I'll just do what you said and do a gallon mixture with the juice and 1-2# honey and see where i get. i'm aiming for 1.100 and hoping it ferments below 1.000.

also, my local store sells honey blend, it's less than half the price of normal honey, would that be ok?

Cane sugar? Table sugar? Beet sugar?

All three are sucrose.