Batch 024: Confuse-a-Cat Vegan "Mead"

I'm taking a shot at making a mead-like beverage for those of our friends who don't consume beverages made with honey. We're naming it after a Monty Python skit: Confuse-a-Cat.

Ingredients for this batch

2016-10-30_21_05_30_HDR — Confuse-a-Cat at bottling time.

1½ lb. Kirkland grade A maple syrup.
1 lb. agave syrup from Torn & Glasser.
½ tsp. of Valley Brewers yeast nutrient.
½ tsp. of Valley Brewers yeast energizer.
Filtered tap water to one gallon.
2 g. Lalvin D-47 wine yeast, rehydrated.
6 oz. Natierra freeze-dried blueberries, added to the fermenting must on 9 Oct.

Yield:

9 x 12 oz. bottles

Total yield: 108 fl oz., or about 85% of a gallon.

Mixed the syrups and the water with the yeast energizer and yeast nutrient, added filtered tap water to one gallon, and agitated in the one-gallon carboy for five minutes to get oxygen into the must. The must itself tastes both wonderful and kind of horrifying at the same time: very sweet, but with a sharpness underneath that's hard to identify. Pitched the yeast and popped in an airlock, then filled the airlock with vodka.

Brew date: 16 September 2016.
Bottling date: 30 October 2016.
Original gravity: 1.060.
Final gravity: 0.995
Estimated ABV: 8.6%

Observations

0190- - _ _ _ — Freeze-dried blueberries, just before they went into the fermenting must.

2016-08-13T10:57: Fermentation's going nicely. There's even a bit of foam building up on the top of the must.
2016-10-09T19:39: Tasted the must: it's dried out a great deal and no longer has the horrifying sweetness it had before; it's starting to taste sort of like actual mead. Added six ounces of freeze-dried blueberries to the carboy. Did not take a gravity reading; that would sacrifice some of the brew.
2016-10-30T17:30: Bottled. Threw out the freeze-dried blueberries; they tasted terrible. This wound up rather dry, with just a hint of berry flavor, and I suspect it'll age into something quite tasty.