On 4-13-2006 11:02 AM, Ray Calvert
Filtering againYou can get a lot of filtration capacity by using a 0.45 micron depth filter to catch the major junk...
Ray,
I think you'd find that 4 lbs of honey in a 1 gallon batch will be pretty close (by my guesstimate, at least) to wine strength after being fermented dry, racked several times, and topped off each time with water.
The Vargas-Gulling book has many useful recipes, but all are single gallon batches. This recipe, and the one for a hot pepper mead, posted by Danny have the same flavor to them as the recipes in "Making Wild Wines and Meads", although I haven't checked to see if they are identical. Not that I'm making any inditement, just pointing out that they seem similar-familiar to me.
Each recipe recommends several rackings, and you lose a large amount (proportionally) of your mead with each racking. I have made single gallon batches from time to time to test a more experimental recipes (methyglyns, for the most part, as I like many herbs and spices but lack the imagination to conceive of how they would taste in a mead), but I gave them up for melomels-pyments, etc, as nearly any of those recipes will be good, and the single gallon size is just too fussy for my tastes.
I also hate the thought of waiting another year to taste a nice mead, once the mere 4 750ml bottles (and a split, maybe) from a gallon batch have been drank or given away. :)
Cheers, Ken Taborek
