Blueberry Question?

[Aspera]

How many lbs of frozen blueberries would you use for 6 gallons of mead fermented to about 15% alcohol (KV1, dryish). So far I've added a quart of blueberry puree/sugar syrup, a quart of white grape juice and 4 lbs. of frozen blueberries. I'm thinkin' that I might want to add more syrup/puree (Marco Polo Italian soda syrup, it just has sucrose and blueberries).

[Ben Brewcat]

In my experience blueberries is one of those very delicate flavors that disappears easily, so you could go pretty big like another five, eight, ten pounds easy depending on how much blueberry you want. The more fruit, the more losses to racking unfortunately. You're very unlikely to have too much blueberry IMO so don't be afraid to go a little crazy smile.gif .

[nursebee]

If blueberries are delicate and keeping a nose is important, you could just lower a bag of crushed fruit into the end of secondary fermentation. A meadmaker that has helped me does this with his fruit meads. It is also easy to primary 5G of plain mead, then make smaller amounts of fruit meads in 1G secondary fermentors.

I have not done blueberry yet, but have done raspberry from concetrate. It was very tasty but neither honey or raspberry could be distinguished. Then again, I can't taste barley in whiskey or beer.

[Aspera]

Those are both great pieces of advice. Unfortunately I've run out of fermenter space and must use the puree because of volume issue. Live and learn I geuss. I have a feeling that this will taste like a sack mead and look like a Zinfindel (not what I hoped for).