Making Blueberry Mead, sort of

I don't know that I'm a mead maker. I do manage to take honey, water and yeast, and occasionally turn them into something tasty and always alcoholic! Today, I got around to a blueberry mead recipe I found online. DW likes blueberry anything and I promised her a year ago I'd make this mead for her. Only when a 2.5 gallon plastic jug of spring water sprang a leak in the kitchen did I finally get started on this mead.

The recipe called for 5 pounds of frozen blueberries. Urr... the plastic bags of berries had been shuffled about the freezers for at least a year and somehow got holes poked in them. I figure the dogs will enjoy them and modified the recipe so it now requires 3 quarts of blueberry juice. $21 worth! I don't know what we paid for the berries. I hope the dogs like them.

The gallon of clover honey I'm using cost about $40. Add another $3 for two packets of wine yeast and a few teaspoons of yeast energizer and nutrients, and pectic enzyme and I've got about $65 (if I count the part of a jug of spring water) tied up in this 5 gallon experiment.

As DW tends to like a sweet wine and I, a semi-sweet mead, I'll have to add at least another 4 pounds of honey to the ferment over the next 4.5 months. That's what, another $12? So I'll have $77 invested before I bottle this one!

If I manage to actually bottle 5 gallons of this mead I'll have 25 fifths of it at a cost of about $3.o8 a bottle. I recycle the bottles and have corks from a previous experiment that went horribly wrong.

Blueberry juice with a packet of yeast and the other dry ingredients getting air whipped into it. I whipped the honey/water and spring water the same way. One of my mead books ("The Compleat Meadmaker" by Ken Schramm) recommends getting as much O2 into a must as possible before adding the yeast and sealing the fermentation bucket against the world.

DW said it smells heavenly. Blueberry people!

Filled to slightly above the 5-gallon mark, covered and air-locked for the next 14 days, maybe. I seldom manage to resist the urge to see all the yeastie bubbles popping on the surface and filling my head with the must's intoxicating fragrances. Just a hint of what the fermentation will do to my head about a year from now! Though the recipe recommends I wait two years before popping a cork. Riiiiight.

DW says she might, might wait until it's 6 months old!

She also says we need to plant an acre of blueberries!

12/5/11 Update. The yeast started working faster than I've ever seen it do before. Within two days it's bubbling the airlock at full throttle!