Sprouts honey sale! Am I a risk taker?

philodice said:

So, Sprouts was selling their $19.99 3lb bottles of honey for $9.99 each. I bought all they had left. So, three bottles. 9lbs of fermentable sugar!

I have my fermaid-k and my DAP and I'm ready to TOSNA!
But, one large batch or three - four 1 gallon batches? Dare I do one big bucket and risk it all in one giant, meady splurge? What if I mess up?

I want to make a TOSNA traditional mead, medium sweet.

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Technically you cant do TOSNA. Here is how it goes:

TOSNA= Fermaid- O only
TiOSNA= Fermaid-K only

Neither uses DAP

So which do you want? True TiOSNA without DAP?

Is this your first mead? First fermentation?
Recipe?
Don't do a damn thing without a HYDROMETER!
There is no medium sweet. These are the categories of sweetness: dry, then off-dry (also called semi-sweet), sweet, dessert. So please specify which you mean.

I cannot answer your questions without more information.

the 9lbs of honey is about 3 gallons (total) of product. if I remember correctly. Its similar to my 1quart honey with 3quart water for around 1.100 SG (depending on honey).

my thoughts are mix it all in one and ferment there (5gal bucket?) or transfer to a 3gal carboy. after fermentation has slowed to a crawl, rack to the gallons where you can play with the flavors.

and you'll hear that you should check out the newbee guide. also uderstand there is nomenclature. I wish I had started with 'meticulous' and 'pitch and leave' methods, instead I dove straight to yeast oxygenation and anti-additives.

actually 1 pound of honey takes up 12 fluid ounces.
Thus one gallon is equal to 10.666 pounds of honey.

9 pounds of honey= 108 fluid ounces or 3 quarts and 12 ounces

Check out meadology series on Youtube

As it was already said you cant TOSNA with K and Dap. But worry not!
TOSNA stands for Tailored Organic (K is half organic half inorganic, DAP is inorganic) Staggered Nutrients Additions.
Dont take it the wrong way. Everyone now is TOSNA this TOSNA that. Well its not TOSNA.
when you are using other nutrients/mix its called SNA which stands for Staggered Nutrient Additions aka adding all the nutrients at different times instead of in one go (and nobody used TOSNA until a few months ago, so dont worry. you can get good results with K and DAP).
With that ammount of honey you will get only 3 gals max, and they wont be very sweet if you want an ABV of around 14%.
As was said, get a hydrometer. Give us a recipe you want/search for one that is up your alley and more info (yeast strain you plan to use, what ABV do you want, etc). The more info, even if its unspecific the better.
And use some time reading the appropiate newbee guide, and basic posts about fermentation or other newbee threads. that way you are less likely to mess up. Get aquainted with the usual terminology such as degass, aereate, SNA, lees, rack etc (most of it in the newbee guide) so you can properly understand any response we give you.

caduseus said:

There is no medium sweet. These are the categories of sweetness: dry, then off-dry (also called semi-sweet), sweet, dessert. So please specify which you mean.

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Easy there. I'm pretty sure some regions of the world have different classifications of dryness levels. For example here we have an article with charts and the whole 9 yards with classifications of medium dry and medium sweet. http://www.jancisrobinson.com/articles/wines-that-are-medium
Just checked wikipedia. A look at what wines are called throughout the world we can see that in English medium, medium sweet, and semi sweet can all be used for wines in the medium region... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweetness_of_wine

Edit again: About recipes. Well he said he wants a medium sweet traditional mead. So yeast, water and residual sugar that leaves the mead in the medium sweet/ semi sweet range. Don't see reason for much more detail than that.
I just hope the honey has a distinctive flavor and aroma. Something which will stand out once the honey is fermented, something apart from the honey's sweetness. If the honey is nothing to write home about you might want to consider metheglins or melomels

Trenchie said:

the 9lbs of honey is about 3 gallons (total) of product. if I remember correctly. Its similar to my 1quart honey with 3quart water for around 1.100 SG (depending on honey).

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edit that .... to make it sound like I know what I'm talking about.

the 9lbs would be used to create 3 gal of must/mead. here are some rough numbers:

1 qt. of honey by volume=3lbs. of honey by weight [48oz.]
some honey is pretty consistently 44 oz for a quart and 22 oz for a pint.