Strawberry Melomel

Mead Lover's Digest #171, 10 July, 1993

Start the yeast in about a pint of water with a few tablespoons of dextrose. Be sure the starter solution and jar are sterile, and at 70-80 F before adding yeast. This yeast should start quickly—a few hours at most.
Clean and hull the strawberries; chop into a few pieces. (Don't crush them or you'll have an impossible mess at racking.) Put them into a sanitized plastic-pail primary.
Bring 4 gallons of water to a full boil. Remove from heat and immediately add the honey; stir thoroughly. (This will sterilize the honey without cooking the flavor out of it.) Cool to about 150-160 F, pour over the berries in the primary fermenter. Cool to pitching temperature (below 80 F) and add yeast starter. Stir thoroughly to mix and aerate.
Every day or two, push the floating mass of strawberries down into the fermenting mead (the equivalent of a winemaker's punching down the cap).
After the strawberries have become very pale—probably ten days or more—strain out as much of the strawberry mass as possible, then rack into a glass carboy. Be prepared for the racking tube to clog. (A stainless Chore Boy over the bottom end of the tube will help.)
Ferment to completion. If necessary, fine with gelatin. Prime with the 4 oz (by weight) of dextrose dissolved in water; bottle using crown caps.

12 lbs strawberries in a 5-gallon batch seemed like a lot at first, but it has worked out right. This gives a pronounced strawberry nose and taste, nothing subtle about it. You could use as much as 15 lbs (3 lbs/gallon) of fruit. I used frozen strawberries...naturally, these are mushier and more likely to create pulp that's hard to manage in the primary, but they also release juice more readily.
The blend of honey was intended to not to mask the strawberry flavor. This turned out not to be an issue; you could shift the balance more toward the alfalfa or other stronger honey. Keep in mind that strawberries don't have a lot of sugar in them. They contribute flavor but not much fermentable.
The mead fermented out in about eight weeks. I have no real idea what the true starting gravity was; it's just not possible to get a useful number with the fruit in it. It finished at 0.991.
We were serving the mead and getting good reviews at sixteen weeks from the start of fermentation (eight weeks after bottling). After almost a year from start, the strawberry character is still holding true.

After some discussion on the Mead Lover's Digest, Micah Millspaw suggested adding a small amount of vanilla extract, and his mead did extremely well in the competition it was entered into. He suggests about 1 Tbs vanilla extract per gallon of mead. He also suggested using ale yeast, which is a suggestion I agree with.