A melomel is just a mead made with fruit, and this one leans sour: tart cherries against honey, taken either as whole frozen fruit or as pure cherry juice standing in for most of the water.
Makes. 5 gallons of must. Whole fruit sits on top of that rather than counting towards it, and what reaches a bottle is less — see the note on what “5 gallons” means.
Vessel. Open-top bucket of about 7.9 gallons, or two 6.5 gallon bucketsBigger than the bucket the other meads use, and the arithmetic is below: 5 gallons of must under 15 lbs of fruit is close to 7 gallons of contents before a cap even forms. The juice route needs far less room.
Yeast. Lalvin 71B, one 5 g sachet. Lallemand's data sheet puts it at 20–40 g/hL, which over 5 US gallons is 3.8–7.6 g — so a single 5 g sachet lands at about 26 g/hL, mid-range, and the two sachets often suggested for a batch this size come to roughly 53 g/hL, past the top of the label. Ferment it between 15 and 30 °C (59–86 °F). Its alcohol tolerance is about 14% v/v. Lalvin ICV D47 is the usual alternative and brings its own numbers rather than borrowing 71B's: also 20–40 g/hL, but 15–28 °C (59–82 °F) and a tolerance up to 15% v/v, so it is a different window to hold the fermenter in.
Water. Spring water if you can get it, otherwise whatever you have. On the fruit route the fruit and the honey go in first and the water tops the must up to 5 gallons — to the must line, not to the rim, and not counting the fruit. The juice route needs very little of it; the two routes are set out below.
Scaling. All of these scale down. A single gallon bottle of fresh apple juice with some of it swapped out for honey will get you a small batch, no special kit required.
Not substitutions. Each one is a different drink, with its own sugar, its own volume and its own vessel.
15 lbs of thawed, pitted tart cherries in a straining bag, with water making up the rest of the must.
3–4 gallons of preservative-free 100% tart cherry juice in place of most of the water.
Two different jobs and the order matters — sanitiser does not work through a film of last batch's sugar. Wash everything the must will touch, then sanitise it with a brewing sanitiser mixed at the concentration and left for the contact time printed on its own bottle. Bucket, lid, airlock, spoon, hydrometer, trial jar, straining bag, and the tubing you will rack with. The sanitiser is not an ingredient and none of it goes in the must.
Warm the honey enough to pour — a sink of hot water around the jar is plenty, and boiling it drives off the aromatics you are paying for. On the fruit route: thaw the cherries, put them in the sanitised bag, and settle it in the bucket, then dissolve the honey in a few gallons of warm water and pour it over. On the juice route: dissolve the honey into the cherry juice directly and skip the bag altogether. Stir until no honey is sitting on the bottom, which takes longer than it looks.
Top up to the 5 gallon must line — on the juice route you may already be at or over it, which is the point of the two routes set out above. Then stir hard: an unmixed must reads a gravity that is true of the top inch and nothing else, and honey sinks. Draw a sample into the trial jar, take the reading, note the temperature, and write both down. This number is the one every later reading is compared against, so it is the one reading you cannot retake.
Follow the sheet for whichever product you are using rather than a rule of thumb. 71B without a protector: rehydrate in ten times its weight of clean 35–40 °C water, stir gently, wait 20 minutes, then mix in a little must at a time until the slurry is within 5–10 °C of the must, and inoculate. Total rehydration should not exceed 45 minutes. With Go-Ferm Protect Evolution, follow that product's sheet instead — its water is 43 °C and the yeast goes into 37 °C, which is not the same procedure.
Estimate About half an hour, and never more than the 45 minutes the sheet allows
Hold the fermenter inside the range for the yeast you actually pitched — 15–30 °C for 71B, 15–28 °C for D47 — and nearer the middle than the top, because a hot ferment on fruit is where hot, solventy notes come from. Feed on the schedule for your nutrient, which is not the same schedule for the two Fermaids. On the fruit route the cherries will float up into a cap: push it back under once or twice a day with a sanitised spoon, because a dry cap grows mould and a cap left alone stops giving up its colour. The juice route has no cap and needs none of this.
Estimate Active fermentation usually runs a couple of weeks, sometimes longer. The cap and the hydrometer decide when it is over, not the estimate
Lift the bag out when the vigorous phase has died down and let it drip rather than wringing it — hard squeezing pushes pulp and bitterness through. Then rack the mead off the gross lees into a clean vessel that it fills, with an airlock on top. Racking is not on a timetable either: it happens when there is a real layer of sediment to leave behind, and again later if another one forms.
Estimate Fruit usually comes out somewhere around the two-week mark
Keep the oxygen out and keep the headspace small. A part-full carboy with a few inches of air above the mead will oxidise over months, so top up with a like mead, move it to a smaller vessel, or accept it will not keep as long. Cool and dark. A young melomel is usually harsher than the same mead six months later, and time is the cheapest correction available.
Estimate Several months is normal and longer generally helps. This is not a deadline
Not when the airlock goes quiet and not when it turns clear. Take a hydrometer reading, take another two or three days later, correct both for temperature, and compare. If they are the same the fermentation is over; if they are the same but sitting well above where the yeast should have landed, that is a stall rather than a finish and bottling it will make bombs. If you want it sweeter than it came out, read the backsweetening note before you add anything at all.
Estimate No estimate. This is the one step decided by a measurement
Bulk age under an airlock with as little headspace as you can manage, then bottle once repeated gravity readings agree. Several months is normal and a year is not unusual for a fruit mead; the figure is an estimate about flavour, and it is never what decides that it is safe to bottle.
Fermentation produces carbon dioxide, and a sealed or blocked vessel is a pressure vessel — the Valentine's Brew blocked its own blow-off tube. These worked for the brewer, which is not the same as working with a different vessel, yeast and kitchen.
Manufacturer data sheets and published references, each one opened and read. The technical figures on this page come from them. The amounts of honey and fruit do not.
What this recipe depends on you getting right
This is written for fruit or juice, not for pie filling
Tart cherries or pure tart cherry juice is what the amounts above assume. Canned pie filling is a different input and not a quantity conversion away: it carries added sugar you have not counted, thickening starch, and usually a preservative chosen to stop fermentation. The starch matters for a reason that catches people out — pectic enzyme breaks down pectin and does nothing to starch, so a starch haze will not clear no matter how long it sits or how much pectic enzyme goes in. Nothing on this page promises a crystal-clear mead, and a pie-filling batch is the case where that promise would be most obviously false.
“Finished” is a hydrometer reading, not a quiet airlock
An airlock goes quiet for reasons that have nothing to do with sugar — a lid that is not seated, a cold night, a cap of fruit lying over the surface — and a mead can be brilliantly clear with sugar still in it. Clarity is not a measurement either. The hydrometer is the only thing that answers the question. The American Homebrewers Association's rule is a reading, then another, and if they are the same the ferment is done; on a mead, which works slowly, leave two or three days between them rather than one, and correct for temperature before comparing. A reading that has stopped moving is still not automatically a finish, because a stall looks the same on the scale — it sits well above where the yeast should have landed and stays there. Telling them apart means knowing roughly where your yeast can get to, which is the alcohol tolerance on its data sheet and is repeated in the yeast line further up this page. A must built past that tolerance is EXPECTED to stop short, and that is a ceiling rather than a fault. A must built well under it that stops anyway is the one to worry about.
Every time on this page is an estimate
None of the durations here is a schedule and no date decides anything. How long a mead takes moves with temperature, pitch rate, nutrient and how much fruit is sitting in the vessel, and two people following this to the letter will not finish in the same month. What ends a step is the condition described in it. What allows bottling is repeated stable gravity readings — never the calendar, never clarity, and never a silent airlock.
What “5 gallons” means here, and what you will actually bottle
Five gallons is the target volume of MUST — the honey and the liquid, measured before whole fruit goes in. Fruit is not part of that number and adds to it: 15 lbs of fruit takes up roughly the volume of its own weight in water, about 1.8 gallons, so a 5 gallon must under 15 lbs of fruit is close to 7 gallons of contents before fermentation lifts a cap above it. That is arithmetic on the weight rather than a measurement — frozen berries pack with air gaps and take up less until they thaw and break down. What reaches a bottle is less than 5 gallons in every case: the fruit holds liquid that leaves with the bag, every racking leaves some behind on the lees, and every hydrometer sample is another cup gone. Build for 5 gallons of must and expect to bottle under it. If 5 gallons in the bottle is the point, scale the whole recipe up rather than squeezing the bag harder.
Measure the fermenter rather than trusting its name
The other meads here ferment 5 gallons in an open-top bucket of about 6.5 gallons, and that air gap is what keeps them out of trouble. That vessel will not take this batch. Five gallons of must plus roughly 1.8 gallons of fruit is about 6.8 gallons of contents, which is over the rim of a 6.5 gallon bucket before there is any cap or foam at all. Either use a larger primary — 7.9 gallon fermenting buckets are a standard size — or split the batch across two 6.5 gallon buckets and combine them at the first racking. A vessel sold as a “6 gallon bucket” is named for what it is meant to hold rather than for where its rim is, so fill yours from a measuring jug once and write the real number on the side. The same caution applies going the other way: these scale down, but the FRUIT has to scale down further than the honey does. Craft a Brew puts a 1 gallon carboy at 1 to 2 lbs of fruit per gallon rather than 3, precisely because it has no room for a cap.
Fermaid O and Fermaid K are different products with different schedules
Both are yeast nutrients and neither one follows the other's dosing. Lallemand's sheet for Fermaid O gives 2 × 20 g/hL — 20 g/hL at the start of alcoholic fermentation and 20 g/hL at a quarter to a third of the way through — which is about 3.8 g per addition in 5 gallons, 7.6 g in total. Fermaid K is 25 to 50 g/hL with a stated maximum of 50 g/hL, split at the end of the lag phase and again at one-third sugar depletion: about 4.7 g to 9.5 g in total for 5 gallons. Either one is suspended in ten times its weight of water or must before it goes in. Fermaid K's sheet addresses honey by name, and what it recommends for a poor fermentation medium is heavier than its general rate — 4 lbs per 1000 gallons of Fermaid K with 2 lbs per 1000 gallons of yeast hulls and 6 lbs per 1000 gallons of DAP, fed incrementally from pitching onward, which is about 9.1 g, 4.5 g and 13.6 g in a 5 gallon batch. Mead-specific feeding protocols circulated in the hobby go higher still, on the argument that honey carries almost no assimilable nitrogen of its own; that is a deliberate departure from the label rather than the label, and the figures here are the manufacturer's. Pick one product and follow that product's own sheet.
Backsweetening: stabilise first, and sorbate alone will not do it
If it finishes drier than you want, the honey does not simply go into the bottle. Virginia Tech's enology extension is blunt about what potassium sorbate is: it “does not kill yeasts but, if properly employed, inhibits their growth”. It cannot stop a fermentation that is still running, which means it is only meaningful once repeated hydrometer readings say the ferment is genuinely over — the two halves of this page people most often skip are the same half. It also does not work alone: lactic acid bacteria growing in the presence of sorbic acid produce 2-ethoxyhexa-3,5-diene, the “geranium” taint, and that source puts the free sulphur dioxide needed at bottling to prevent it at approximately 30 mg/L. The rate given is 150 to 300 mg/L of sorbic acid, and potassium sorbate weighs 1.34 times the sorbic acid level being aimed at — 201 to 402 mg/L, or roughly 3.8 g to 7.6 g in 5 gallons. How far up that range you need to go moves with pH, alcohol and free SO2, and the same source advises against sorbate altogether in anything intended for long aging. Stabilise, wait, then sweeten a measured sample and taste it before treating the batch.