Yeti Mead Brew Session

This was easy to put together from the standpoint that you simply dump the honey, water, and yeast in a fermentor. I didn't warm the honey up much and that was a mistake as it was slow to get into the fermentor and then it was slow to mix in with the water. Next time, I really need to be fastidious in using warm water and honey when first combining ingredients. 1/24 - Checked on this and there are a lot of very fine bubbles rising to the surface but no krausen really. It looks like there may have been a krausen as there is some foam residue up the neck of the 1 gallon bottle but nothing now. The yeast is settled on the bottom of the fermentor, which normally the yeast would be moving rapidly about with CO2 production. In any case, this is a lot calmer of a fermentation than I was expecting. The aroma coming off the airlock has a nice Belgian yeast quality to it. 2/7 - this is starting to drop clear. I'm guessing that I will need about 4 weeks total for this to finish out, so I'm looking for another 2 weeks before bottling. 2/18 - bottling half of this today. Half of this mead was racked onto 4lb of cherry puree that I made from frozen cherries and mixed in some vodka to help sanitize. I'll let the half racked onto fruit sit for a month or so. I measured the gravity of the cherry puree and it came out to 1.028. I purchased another 1/2lb of honey that I will dissolve into the 2L of cherry puree, which will give the juice a gravity of 1.065 just about, so this will match, roughly, the OG of my mead. This is an obscure way of accoplishing this fruit addition but c'est la vie. I added 2g of T-58 yeast as I was concerned that the Monastic might be too tired to referment so much sugar and I want this to attenuate completely. The Compleat Meadmaker book suggests 2.9 volumes CO2 via 3/4 cup of dextrose into 5 gallons; I'm bottling into 2 750mL Belgian bottles with 3 sugar drops each, which will yield closer to 3.75 volumes of CO2. Actually finished at 0.997 gravity, yielding an ABV of 8.4%. The sample tasted like a mead with lots of honey flavor and some tartness on the end, so I felt that an acid addition wasn't warranted. I'm anxious to see how this carbonates out. I'll give it a month before cracking it open. 3/18 - bottled the cherry melomel today with 5 carb drops each and maybe 10mL of reactivated CBC-1; I should've read my notes better about 3 drops but 5 will produce something more like champagne, so that's fine. Pycnometer pulled 1.000 for a gravity. Sample tasted vinuous at first, then morphs into mead flavor. Pretty good.