A couple questions for tomorrows mead

[janitorjerm]

I'm planning on making a mead tomorrow. I have 3 quarts of prickly pear fruit juice and 1 quart of loquat fruit juice. I purchased some 1116 yeast and some fermax and yeast nutrient from my lhbs and I have 3 pounds of local wildflower honey. Can anyone help me with a recipe and a staggered yeast nutrient plan for this? All I've ever made before is jaom.

[janitorjerm]

I should also mention I was going to do a one gallon batch

[Chevette Girl]

Welcome to the forum!

Do you have a hydrometer? If you don't, I'd suggest you get one, otherwise you can't really do a staggered nutrient schedule with any degree of accuracy, and if you're not going to get one before you start this batch, I'd recommend adding your energizer shortly after pitching the rehydrated yeast and your nutrients after the airlock starts to bubble. You can still make acceptable meads without SNA, I made meads for years, front-loading with nutrients before discovering the existence of yeast energizer, and they were fine...

If you do have a hydrometer, great... What I'd do is mix juice with honey to get a SG of something between 1.100 and 1.120 (depends how strong you want it, and the stronger it is the longer you'll probably want to age it), add pectinase if you have any (and give it at least 12 hours to do its thing before pitching), then rehydrate your yeast and pitch it... At the end of lag phase (once the SG starts to drop), give it some nutrients and energizer...

My lazy-a$$ staggered method is to give it maybe 1/4 of the total amount of DAP and 1/3 of the energizer around the end of lag phase and then mix the rest of what I was going to give it as a total into one container and then every aeration, check the SG and feed it an amount of this mixture such that your last feeding and aeration should happen somewhere near the 1/3 sugar break (if your must is 1.120, that will be at 1.080).

Different sources will suggest different amounts, but with a yeast like 1116 that isn't too "needy", I like to go with 1 to 1/2 tsp of DAP (nutrients) and 1/4 to 1/2 tsp energizer, which is respectively full to half dose and full to double dose if you go by the recommendations on the package (they are of course geared towards front-loading grape musts), if I double the dose of energizer, I use half the dose of the nutrients.

Good luck with it!

[janitorjerm]

So nutrients and energizer at a quarter to half dose every day until sugar break? Thank you for your reply

[Chevette Girl]

You really need to be keeping an eye on the fermentation, if it takes off like crazy and the SG drops quickly (like one recent pineapple batch that was well past its 1/3 break within 24 hours), I give it more of its allotted nutrients each time because there will be fewer times, if it's a less vigorous fermentation it'll get more smaller doses spread over a longer time, and I try to aerate and check the SG at least twice a day until it's hit the 1/3 point.

If you do a forum search on "staggered", you will find a lot of different theories on how to set up your staggered nutrient addition schedule, my method is only one of many ways to do it, pick what works for you.