So I've been thinking of branching out from beer and doing a mead or melomel or something. I LOVE tart cherries and just saw concentrated tart cherry juice at my grocery store. I have NO experience with meads or melomels but I'm willing to try!!

Here is the concentrate I can get. 68 brix, which is 1.321 SG.

32 oz of concentrate
3# local honey
Yeast nutrient
enough water to make 2.13 gallons
either d-47 or ec1118 yeast

I plan to do this in an LBK, any issues there? Can I bottle this in beer bottles for aging? how long do you think this would need to age to be drinkable? How long should I ferment? Am I missing anything in the recipe? Can I backsweeten this with more tart cherry concentrate? I would prolly need a campden tablet to kill the yeast before backsweetening it right?

lots of questions, i know but beer is a bit different from this!!

Yup, you can make it in the LBK, no problem. I've done several meads/melomels that way (because honey is friggin' expensive, and the smaller batch size keeps prices down).

Yep, beer bottles work great for aging...I'd probably bottle with oxygen absorbing caps, but mainly just because of the long aging needed. Speaking of aging, I'm betting you'll need a minimum of 6 months, but probably more like a year or two.

Personally, I'd probably use a bit more honey...maybe 4-6 lbs. And I wouldn't backsweeten, I'd just try to push the yeast past its ABV limit with staggered honey and nutrient additions (in which case you'd probably want to use a beer yeast instead of a wine yeast) so you can end up with a semisweet melomel.

Ferment 'til it's done, and think in terms of weeks and months instead of days and weeks like you do for beer.

awesome, thanks jon. I may just let this go dry, the main reason i want to backsweeten is so i dont lose the tart cherry flavor. But i guess tartness would do better with dry melomel than with a sweet melomel right? Do i need to worry about adding tannin or anything like that? i saw a melomel addition pack at AHS that might be worth it.

Nah, I wouldn't add any tannin or anything like that until you've tried it with just juice and honey. The melomel addition pack probably includes acid blend, and I'd think that you'd get plenty of acid from the tart cherry juice.

Dry meads/melomels tend to take a little more time to come around than sweet/semi-sweet ones, but they all take a boatload of conditioning time to really come around.

Another option for yeast is to pitch onto the yeast cake of a beer. Something like a helles or a kolsch would be great...loads of healthy yeast to really go to town on the sugars in the must.

yeah, it had acid blend. I'm really thinking about doing this as a 1 gallon trial size before stepping up. That would give me 10 - 12 oz bottles of this. Easier to store and so forth. I wanna try it with the mead yeast, prolly the ec1118 the more i think about it. my fermenters are busy for a little while but I'm wondering if I couldn't do this in a different container? maybe a food safe bucket from the hardware store or something.

Nah, just do it in a LBK, unless you don't want to tie one up.

As for smaller fermentors, pick up a gallon of fancy apple juice or one of those 4 L glass jugs of wine and save the bottle.

I've been trying to find a glass bottle of apple juice, and have only found half gallons so far. I gave up and got a gallon jug from my LBHS.

good idea jon. i figure i can safely ferment .75 gallons in a gallon jug, that gives me 8 - 12 oz bottles. hmmmm....i could also use all that apple juice for a cider couldnt I?

Or just man up and do a full LBK-sized batch.

so do you think the tart flavor will shine through or will fermenting this remove any tartness and just leave me with a dry cherry melomel? I read a couple of recipes for people who did this and the commented on the strong cherry flavor but no one said anything about sourness staying.