11 or 12 lbs of light honey. I used the remainder of the orange blossom honey that I bought last year.
5 lbs of must from prickly pear cactus. See my comment on Rev. Joe's blog.
Basically we roasted the Tunas on the BBQ, sliced and scooped the guts out, squeezed the skins for the last bit of juice, then froze the whole mess. We picked a 5 gal bucket of Tunas and wound up with 10 lbs of juice (split between two batches) after we thawed and sieved the mess.
Boil 2 gal of water, cut the flame and add the honey to the hot water. Stir. Stir some more..
Oh yeah, we put the yeast food and a Whirl Floc tablet into the water with the honey.
Pour the honey water over the Tunas mush in the primary fermenter.
Stir. Chill with an immersion chiller to 80 F.
Pitch the yeast. It's all good.
OG 27 Brix.
none
las Tunas - 5 lbs of juice per batch
mine: Cotes des blancs
OJ's: US 05, to be followed with Lalvin 1118 (champagne yeast) in secondary
Use leather gloves when dealing with las Tunas!
OJ racked his fraction on 10/28 and reports that the gravity at that time was 1.010. Amazing how much the US 05 attenuated it! He racked onto a slurry of rehydrated Lalvin EC-1118 champagne yeast. His is going to be a very dry mead.
I racked my fraction on 10/29 and the measured gravity was 1.008. The color is an incredible bright red-orange. I'm going to let mine roll without any further yeast additions.
It should be interesting to compare the two melomels in another couple of months.