Berry Mix Mead, My Recipe...

Hi Wheesthemead! You may not have had any responses because your are not really asking any questions to which you don't already have an answer. No answer is going to be better (or worse) than the answers you have already provided yourself. Should you taste your mead? Why should you not? You should be tasting everything you make all the time especially when you add something and when that additive should have fully worked its way into and through your must or mead. so sure, taste the mead. It will taste very "green" - because it is. That's what a green mead tastes like.
Should you rack it? Sure. JAOM is a novelty mead and is not a model for mead making. When the active fermentation has ceased and the density (specific gravity) is close to 1.000 you should rack this off the fruit and into vessels that have no head room.
Should you be using bread yeast? Only if you have a very specific reason to want to use a yeast cultivated to make bread and not grown to make a wine or a mead. Can bread yeast make a wine? Sure: it is the same species but that is a lot like saying that you can use a Clydesdale horse to run a steeple chase race. You can. It will come in last and it won't be able to jump any fence... but it's a horse and it will qualify. But no one who races horses will enter a Clydesdale. Bread yeast won't increase its biomass in the short time you need the yeast to start fermenting. It won't do anything for mouthfeel. It won't do anything to enhance fruity flavors. It isn't designed to flocculate and drop out of suspension leaving you with a clean tasting wine or mead. It's designed to ferment in flour for a few hours and then be killed at about 400 F after producing enough CO2 in dough to create oven bounce. It's probably a little less expensive than wine yeast but that's like spoiling a $50 bottle of wine to save a couple of pennies.

Wheresthemead! said:

I only asked two questions. A simple example of when others do a taste test would have been ideal but I didn't write it that way.
As for my method of mead making, I can't afford the regular equipment. The JOAM isn't ready yet. This post wasn't about JOAM really.
The real model of mead making is the way the Vikings did it. Which, I bet, nobody really does.
Now, I will return to my woodworking projects. And plotting my garden.

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That's such a silly statement about Vikings. The Vikings didn't have anything special over anyone else. Mead was made a few thousand years before the Vikings made it. They were smart and had they had access to our modern protocols they would be doing what we promote here iin the community. Why would you embrace a protocol that produces much inferior products? Ididan would have cut down trees and made bow with a chainsaw instead of a rock if they could have. Not many still pull a buggy behind a horse to work these days. Running water is nice as well. Your probably the only one working an a vicking ship in their garage. I would make the best mead I can even if it wasn't so expensive. And even more so because it is.

I think you will learn more by tasting your mead every few days during fermentation and anytime after that along the way. Why would you wait so long? If you taste it along the way you will eventually learn to taste a mead in any phase and be able to tell where it's heading and what it will taste like once it's finished fermenting.