You likely won't need nutrients for a mead made with fruits. I usually wait to add things like noots or energizer if there's a stuck ferment of something similar.
Originally Posted by Zane
Buckets are fine for primary, and are great if you'll do a secondary with the fruit. Avoid making a fruity primary if you can; the cap is a hassle and many of the aromas from the fruit get scrubbed out by devlolving CO2. After the vigor of fermentation slows, get it into glass for any prolonged storage/conditioning.
There is one two-part clarifying agent that works for 97% of meads: time and gravity . For stubborn haze or hurried meads, any number of finings work. Or try chillproofing it.
Corn sugar is easy to measure, is largely sterile, and has a known sugar content by weight allowing you to sparkle exactly as much as you want (barely pettillant to champagne-like). Honey's sugars can vary a tiny bit, contain osmophilic yeasts, and must be dissolved first.
A good all-purpose nuclear bedtime story fermentation temp is around 65.
Carbonation is really a seperate issue and character than dryness/sweetness, though the sparkle does lighten the feeling on the tongue. And the carbonic acid has a flavor of its own. But one can have a very dry sparkling mead or a very sweet but sparkling mead. Though sweet and sparkling is difficult to do without kegging, pasteurizing bottles or other advanced techniques. The yeast didn't read your recipe, so if they can wake up enough to eat your priming sugars they'll happily keep eating your residual sweetness in the mead and you can get overcarbonation (frustrating and even messy) up to bottle grenades (frustrating, exciting and divorce-inducing if not actively maiming ).
An din terms of recipes, lots of old threads have recipes or read the Intro to Meadmaking stickied thread. Either way (you make a recipe or we help come up with one) we'll need to know how sweet or dry you want the finished mead, how much alcohol, and whether you'll use fruit. The Intro has an (I think) important section on recipe formulation that can help get a mazer started.
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