I can tell you that from my experience, along with many others, the yeast you have is notoriously unreliable, and will definitely not be ready in time for your August 1, deadline. Both the Wyeast and White Labs in my frank opinion suck ass. If you want more do a forum search.
As to your recipe. Here's what I suggest to do with what you have:
Five Gallon Batch:
12 lbs Clover honey (yeah, I saw that you only have 8.5 but you wanted something that will be ready by Aug 1, and I think somewhat palatable)
3.5 Gallons cider
0.5 Gallons pom-cherry juice
10 grams Lalvin 71B-1122
Rehydrate your yeast in pure water at a temperature of 104 degrees.
In a plastic fermentation bucket, or in a 6.5 gallon carboy, add 6 grams of DAP to the primary before you pitch your yeast. Aerate well. DO NOT airlock your mead, just cover the bucket or mouth of the carboy with a sanitized cotton cloth for the first 3 days.
At the end of the lag phase (when you see noticeable foam on the surface of the mead after several hours) add 4 grams of DAP. Aerate well.
Aerate your mead twice daily for the first four days, then airlock it and swirl the bucket or carboy every other day. You may also stir, but do so slowly so as not to aerate at this point since you will be risking oxidation.
If you see your fermentation slowing after four days have some inert yeast (yeast hulls, yeast ghosts, etc.) available and add at a rate of .75 grams/gallon of must, this will help to pick up the fermentation.
As soon as the airlock activity slows to two beats per minute, rack to secondary on top of your spices.
Rack again with all airlock activity has ceased.
This should put you on schedule for your August 1 delivery date.
Other things:
Skip the ginger root as it will tend to clash early on with the tannic elements of the cherry, the acid of the apple juice and the mustiness of the pomagranate.
Add your spices to the mead after you have racked from primary in a grain back.
Don't heat your honey and juice, just blend them together and use a long handled plastic brew spoon to mix and aerate if you do not have a whip degasser or lees stirrer.
Hope that helps,
Oskaar
- and I really am not into the Ancient Orange type thing or what have you. My basic ingredients, since I'm on a budget, are plain old regular clover honey (got eight and a half pounds of that sitting in the kitchen right now), filtered or unfiltered apple juice without any preservatives (got a couple gallons of that sitting out there too) and some pomegranate-cherry juice, no preservatives, since there's a big bottle of that in my kitchen as well. We keep several gallons of spring water on hand for drinking, so that's the water I plan to use. Oh, and I was thinking fresh ginger root, cinnamon sticks, cloves... that's the inventory of spices that I can see using, anyway. I've spent the past week or so reading through various recipes, and this is kind of cobbled together in my head from elements of about three of them that looked interesting and at least claim to be able to produce something quick, drinkable, and fairly tasty. Not looking for perfection here, since this will be my first batch, but just something decent. As it's a bit of an experiment, I'm not looking to spend a ton of money, either. The main thing I'm brewing for the same event is ale, but I wanted to have a mead or melomel or something for variety's sake.
