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Accurate gravity reading

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Will it take longer to ferment if you use fruit... The definitive answer is: maybe.

There are so many factors that affect your ferment, the fruit can help sometimes (like being a buffer to prevent the pH from dropping too far or having some micronutrients a plain honey must might be missing) or hinder (takes some time for the yeast to break down the fruit enough to get all the sugars), so it's really difficult to predict what it will do. If I'm using fruit, I ferment on it and it takes as long as it takes.

The way I typically do my ferments (which includes yeast nutrients, yeast energizer, aeration and pH monitoring) usually the thing that causes one ferment to take longer than another ferment is the amount of honey. The higher the original gravity, the harder it is for the yeast to get going and do their job. For me, hydromels, even ones with fruit in them, tend to finish really quickly.
 
Thanks for all the tips. The mead calculator doesn't seem to be working and I'm not sure why. I read the instructions for calculation the ABV with extra fruit, but nothing happens when I click calculate. Does anyone have any thoughts on what I'm doing wrong?
 
I'd like to revisit this topic because I'm still a bit confused. I am planning to make a batch of strawberry basil melomel. I used to mead calculator to give me an estimate of what the ABV will be, but I'm still not sure how to get an accurate OG reading (maybe I'm thinking about it wrong). The OG that I take will include the sugar from the honey, but not the whole strawberries, right? Is there any way to account for the sugar in the strawberries that will eventually be converted to alcohol when taking the OG reading?
 
One method is to check out the USDA's website where it lists the nutritional values of thousands of foods including fresh fruits (and so strawberries). I would think that if you go to that site
http://ndb.nal.usda.gov/ndb/foods/s...nt=&max=35&offset=&sort=&qlookup=strawberries
you could get a pretty good estimate of the sugar content of the strawberries you are adding and so it should be fairly easy to get a reasonable guestimate of the total starting gravity. (if you know the quantity of strawberries you divide it the portion size used by the USDA and so multiply the sugar content by the number of portions your batch makes up, then add that to the sugar content of your honey. Divide that number by the number of gallons of mead you are making. That will give you the number of lbs of sugar per gallon. Multiply that number by .040 to give you the starting gravity of your batch) -

To give you an example, if there is about 7 g of sugar in a cup of strawberries and you have 1 gallon of the fruit then if 2 C = 1 pint you have about 16 C of strawberries. 16 C of strawberries = 112 g (7 * 16) and 112 g = about 4 oz. Four oz of sugar in one gallon of mead will increase the gravity by 10 points. If you were making a mead (one gallon) with say, 3 lbs of honey, that would give you a gravity of about 1.120. With the added strawberries you could expect the gravity to rise to about 1.130.
(If you have 10 gallons of strawberries then you multiply the 4 oz by 10 and so on)

Second option might be to press a strawberry at random and extract a little juice and use a refractometer to measure the sugar content. You might press a few strawberries to see how typical the sugar content is.

A third possibility would be to freeze the fruit and then allow it to thaw with some added pectic enzyme to help break down the juice. If you then measure the gravity of that juice with your hydrometer (or use a refractometer if the quantity is very small) that should give you a fair idea of the quantity of sugar available from the fruit.
 
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