Raspberries now or later?!

[DAGruenwald]

3 lbs Wildflower Amber honey
1/4 tsp Go-Ferm
1/4 Tsp Fermaid-K
K1-V1116
h2o to 1 gallon

Rehydrated yeast @108 deg. for 15 min, pitched, aerated for 15 min.
SG- 1.098

2 days later added 1/8 tsp Fermaid-K, aerated (shook jug) Sg-1.070
1 day later aerated (shook) again.

1 week into my first batch, bubbling well, tastes fine.
Question 1- Should I continue aerating? Shake every day or so?
Question 2- Planning on making it a raspberry melomel (because my wife will like it), should I put raspberries in now or during secondary fermentation? I'm assuming I have another week or so in the primary fermentation.
Question 3- is the alcohol content high enough now that I don't need to heat/sterilize the raspberries? I'm guessing if I measured it would be about 8-10%
Question 4- should I add one more dose of 1/8 tsp of Fermaid-K?

Any help/advice is appreciated! If this initial batch goes well odds are my wife will tolerate continued mead-making less begrudgingly!

 

[fatbloke]

I've found that with raspberry, if the fruit goes in primary, all the fruit sugars are consumed, leaving a very dominant, somewhat acidic sort of flavour.

Given that the raspberry flavour we seem almost programmed to enjoy is that of the base fruit, possibly with a little sweetener of some sort, I'd just let it finish as a traditional, stabilise it with sulphite and sorbate, then add the fruit for a couple of weeks with pectic enzyme, then taste and if necessary, back sweeten. Then clear it etc........

 

[akueck]

You can probably stop aerating it about now, sounds like you're around 1/3 of the way through.

I like fruit in the primary, personally, but I am a big fan of the fermented flavors. If you want it to taste like a raspberry off a bush, it's better to have some sugar in there. You can add some berries now, stabilize and add more later. Or you can let it finish as it is, stabilize and add berries then.

As long as the berries are relatively washed off, you should be good just dunking them in there.

 

[Kelvin]

I'm not sure if this will correlate with mead, Fatbloke, but I made 2 separate batches of Raspberry wheat beer and the one that I put the raspberries into primary had a much stronger raspberry flavor although as you said it was a bit tart. That actually subsided some with age in the bottle. A bit more of the beer flavor came out but the fruit was still very dominate. The one that I put the fruit in during secondary was much more subtle but I didn't leave it in long because I felt that my first attempt had too much fruit dominance.