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.

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.

switched it to cane sugar. looks about the same. thanks!!

as soon as i get a fermenter open i'm going to get this going!

they were just advertising ocean spray cran-cherry... that might help accentuate the "tart"ness you seem to be looking for.

I picked up 2 cans of oregon tart cherries today. now sure when to add them, I don't think i'm going to rack to secondary (do I need to?) so I was planning to pulverize them and add them into primary.

I would, just to make it easier to add the cherries...and meads can benefit from racking, just to get them off the old yeast/trub (since they can take months to ferment).

so....start the ferment, rack around 1.030ish onto the blended cherries and then rack once more before bottling? do I need new yeast each time?

No new yeasts are needed, you are racking to continue to settle out yeasts, and clarify.

how stable do i need to keep temps on this? i was thinking about just putting it in the beer closet - ranges from 68 to 72ish normally.

Stable temps are always ideal, but that temp range should be fine, depending on what yeast you go with.

i got the d-47. range is pretty wide on that one.

Yeah, but isn't the high end like 68&Deg;? I wouldn't want to go above that...maybe a swamp cooler in the beer closet?

you're right...i was thinking of EC-1118 (50*-86*). d-47 is 59*-68*. I'll just stick it in the fermentation fridge.

i have a hectic weekend coming up...thinking about throwing this together really quick just to keep something going.

Might as well...given the long conditioning time it'll need, getting it started sooner will only help.

picked up the 3# of local honey today for $10. dang good deal I think. I'll be throwing this together tomorrow I think.

Just to make sure I have it straight:

96 oz of juice
3# of honey
--------------
mix the two and make sure they are well combined
--------------
add water if needed to get to my OG
--------------
add yeast nutrient at this point? (not sure when to add)
--------------
rehydrate yeast and pitch
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rack to secondary with 2 cans of tart cherries when FG is @ 1.030
--------------
ferment out and bottle and age

sound about right?

Sounds about right...you probably won't need any water, just the juice and honey should ferment.

Add the nutrient at the beginning, and each time you add anything...you might consider racking to secondary with one can and nutrient, waiting a few days, then adding the other can (and a touch more nutrient), but either way should work fine...if you add everything at once, it might take a little longer, over all.

As another option, start the yeast in 2 quarts of the juice, wait until fermentation is going, then add 1 lb of the honey, wait a week or so, add another pound, wait another week or two, add the last pound...add nutrient each time you add more honey, and if you've got the fermentor free, rack it to a new one. The slight bit of aeration and the nutrient will *really* help the yeast to keep going.

awesome. feel like i've got a good hold on this. thanks!!