How can I primary a wine and Mead together?

john G said:

In a couple of weeks the local farmers will have strawberrys available.
I have planned to make several gal of a strawberry wine and one gal of strawberry Melomel.

How can I ferment 3 gal in a primary then separate one gal off and add the honey to produce a mead? When do I separate and the problem of yeast movement?

The recipe I have suggest it can't be done but proberbly more important it should not be done, but I had to ask.

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John,

Is there a reason why you can't separate your one gallon of strawberry base from the other two gallons right from the start, before fermentation, so as to make your mead and wine separately? That would be optimum.

Could you post up the exact recipe you have, along with the changes you'd like to make in it? It's not necessarily wrong to stagger your sugars (which is, effectively, what you're describing), however, if you're not after a particular effect through this method, or have no experience with it, I'd suggest sticking with fermenting your wines and your melomels on their own.

-David

What are you going to use to secondary the wine?

Strawberry season lasts several weeks where I live. You could do the wine first, then make the mead three weeks later. The champagne yeast should have pretty much finished by then.

Sorry, I don't know how the mead would turn out, but I think you'd want to cold stabilize the wine before adding a new yeast.

john G said:

David,
As I looked at two recipes it occured to me that chemical products(?) as versus the fruits and sugar where identical, although there is a Q about quanity. One exception: Wine requires Champagne yeast and the Mead Montrachet plus nutrients.
The Melomel recipe comes from Dmntd on this web site and the wine recipe from Jack Keller's Strawberry Wine (3).
Basicaly Strawbwerry, raisens, dates and sugar for the wine. The Mead required Honey and Strawberrys.
Chem products where similar: Acid Blend,Grape tannin.Campden tablets, pectic enzyme, and yeast.
Process typical wine Primary, covered with boiling water where as the Honey required preboiling

Why? Well it jumped out at me there was a savings. My old Industrial Eng days. Combining similar chemical products, need of only one primary bucket and of course time.
John

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John,

The additions of camden tablets & acid blend as well as the boiling of the honey show this to be an older "wine" type recipe. Current thinking is unboiled honey, water, yeast, and a staggered nutrient addition.

There are current recipes around. Do you have a copy of the Complete Meadmaker? Ken has some good recipes that are actually MEAD recipes, not a beer or wine recipe with honey.

Do your diligence and read up on the Newbees section.

There are several extensive threads on strawberry meads of varing sucesses, search for those. Strawberry flavor can be very difficult to capture as it is so much about the scent of the fruit.

My answer to your question is (in my opinion) multi-tasking, while efficent, often gives substandard results. Make wine. Make mead. They really are 2 different things.

YMMV,

Leonora

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