I am going to kick this brew off tomorrow. Instead of 5 gallons though, I am going to scale it down to 1 gallon as a test run.



Poor man’s Mead

3 pounds of clover honey

1 Gallons Spring water

½ cup of Grape nuts wort. This serves as a yeast nutrient

1 cup of homemade wine yeast.



For this test I will use the Grape wild yeast recipe.

Step one will be to capture the grape yeast on Friday and let this develop as mentioned before. As Arpolis posted, wild yeast can be hard to control. In order to give this project the best chance of success I will try to kill off most of the Hitchhiker bacteria in the following manner.



I am going to add half a cup of the homemade wine yeast to two cups of grape juice in a mason jar. Seal the lid and refrigerate for 48 hours. This will kill the hitchhikers



I will then remove the Mason jar and let the solution ferment once again. I hope this will make the wild yeast dominant in the second fermentation. Hopefully this will allow our captured wild yeast to kill off any secondary bacteria or yeast that may try to take hold during the second fermentation.



Next I plan on pitching this yeast into the Poor man’s Mead. If all goes to plan I will post the starting gravity reading to this post on 5/24/2013.



What could go wrong?



The wild yeast strain can turn out to be very weak and not tolerable of higher alcohol levels. This may result in very sweet mead with an alcohol by volume of about 4%. If this happens the project is bust. Either I will have to pitch new wild yeast or switch back to a professionally cultured yeast strain.



The wild yeast strain may add undesirable flavors or odors. If that is the case then I plan on adding a few whole cloves to the Must in the secondary to mask this issue.



Maybe, just maybe all will go well.



Anybody see any flaws with this plan before I kick the experiment off?