I pitched a strawberry mead/fruit wine last weekend. Small 1gal batch- I took 5lb strawberries and heated them up (not boiling) in water for about 20 min or so until the color was taken out of the berries. So then I was left with some nice strawberry flavored juice. I put the pulp in a nylon bag. Then, added 2lb honey, and probably another 2lb or so 1/2 granulated sugar, 1/2 light brown sugar. Added the chemicals (don't have the recipe in front, but some acid, a bit of tannin, and yeast food) and waited 24hr and pitched Lalvin k1-v1116. This is only my 2nd wine ever so I'm a newbie, but so far that has been a great high-gravity producing mead. After about a week it had gone from O.G. 1.118 to .996 which is 16.1% abv. I can tell I did a better job with this one than my 1st batch. Even though this is not quite a standard melomel, since I'm only using 1/2 honey to sweeten, I hope that it ends up having some interesting complexity say a year from now lol. I went ahead and racked out of primary into secondary this weekend. I took the bag of strawberry pulp and squeezed a lot of the juice out and got rid of it when I racked to 2ndary. It is strong and a bit harsh, but I've heard this yeast will age very nicely. I'll bulk age for quite a long time probably. I can tell I did a lot better with this one b/c even though it's harsh, there are no strong "off" flavors as with my first batch of mead where I had to pitch yeast twice, and kept it on the lees way too long. I'm sure I'll end up trying others and may try to add some fruit back in during secondary in order to try to get as much flavor packed in there as possible.
