Sorry for your loss. I was waiting for this brew too!
Did the starter start though?
What was the grain bill? And in starter?
Let me know if you need another tube! Amount in that package should be enough for typical batch even without starter, although making a starter is always a good idea. This strain usually starts within hours.
You can also throw berries, spices into mead quite liberally. Absolutely simplest, stuff, the only catch is long fermentation times. Yet, you can get quite awesome products in half year with tart berries or fruits.
I remember a couple tasting our simple mead once, and wife turned to her husband and said "hey, when you did the brewing, why did not you brew something nice instead, like this stuff?" So I'm pretty sure this is your best guess.
I was wrong many times on the matter. We had an idea to make strawberry beer for ladies, like "chicks like strawberry" - wrong! Dudes were like "honey, try some of this!" and drank bottles after bottles of pink beer, while their gfs gorged on proper imperial and belge style stuff.
But mead is solid option, always. Just make sure spice is not chili, unless she is into it.
I think you are correct here, Eskov's monographies often mention response of bees to electromagnetic field; almost all effects fade above 1kHz it seems - below this value lies eigenfrequencies of their body hair that are often electrostatically charged, it was indeed possible to agitate bees with ~500Hz AC field by literally rubbing their bellies remotely.
This charge detection actually plays important role in bees colony, as other bees can sense surveying bee returning from the flight and being more charged after interacting with environment outside of beehive; in fact, they've made experiments with charged bee-shaped doll that other bees were responding to, only if it was charged, from quite large distances in the hive.
But at higher frequencies, nothing really interacted with them. I was looking into designing radio probe to talk to them through the wood - doesn't seem feasible.
(I fail to find the links, as I've read this research in original language, and it's quite old, 70-90s. There were some absolutely mad tests, like placing 500V capacitor at hive entry - bees merely slowed down to charge and discharge and proceeded normally. Of course, there was lots of dissection and electrode sticking too, soviet scientists had little mercy for insects).
But this review seems to be just mixing together irrelevant facts from different research that are not really connected. The claim is hot and clickbait, but evidence is not building the story indeed.
Once I had a (paid) task to look for chemical processes that are proven to be stimulated or retarded by microwaves, but not through simple heating. It was a hard task, due to publications like this one lumping together cause and effect at different wavelengths and different irradiation setups. I found none, and to date I keep coming back to this puzzle and there is still nothing. I do not think there is anything there, we should've found it by now. I began to understand just why (anything molecular-size is within near field of MW and any scattering would inevitably be nonlocal on molecular level). There could be structural effects, like resonating on insect's frame, but, as you mention, bees are too small for WiFi range.
Finally, I must say that I'm building a sensor array in beehives, it's wireless and uses LoRa, throwing packets from the frames; bees are not impressed at all. In fact, few families made clubs just around the sensors this winter and survived; if they can tolerate the field from within millimeters away from antenna that shoots over few km, they should not care about our feeble wifi.
I mean it certainy looks like fermentation started late and there always are wild things on fruits. No boiling mentioned. There must be at least active lactics and mould seeds. Something might always try to wake up later.
Even hydrometer is not safe method to tell that it's done if you have unknown biology going inside. The safest thing to do is use plastic pressure-resistant bottles that do not shatter.
And yeah, cooling will only slow secondary and make the product taste differently (maybe better, expecially since winter is over). It will not make it safer in any manner.
Well, to be honest, regular bread yeast is good for quite many styles, from kvass (which is kind of very close to this recipe) to sahti and some meads. Just got to know where you are going to get there.
It does not seem to be boiled anywhere, and sugar content is relatively low, and it is highly possible that this thing is contaminated by lactics by now with all the date and sesame. Which is probably good thing, it would bring some sourness and - as others here mentioned - might prevent further fermentation at some point, although there is no sure bet, as well as with pretty much everything here. If bubbling in pure sugar mixture started after 3 weeks, that's very late start, my bets are that yeast is not alone there.
So, if it smells nice, it should be safe according to US government regulations (lol yes), can't be safer - but keep your toilet paper ready and get a plunger before you need it if you don't have one, just in case.
Even 2 years ago, yew was way way worse than actually writing js by hand.
Yes, it does! When it's crushed, it's not-so-slow release, mostly of oily matter that just stays inside if they are only cracked. And in the end, the powder could sink, or it could stay on surface, cling to tubing, clog filters, etc. And the regret of actually doing more work to grind on top of that!
There is also small increase of chances to contaminate the product, extra solid surface (negligible area in almost whole nuts versus non0negligible in powder) can harbor and somewhat protect species that are normally intolerant to alcohol.
Right, it does sound like kveik. Wouldn't guess which one or even whether it actually is kveik, I doubt that category really exists in a well defined manner lately, but is clearly useful as object property. I should probably start testing yeasts at high temperature as well as on cold, might be gems hidden there.
I can share an arcane secret here: I don't do step feeding. After a volume of complex theoretical and experimental science (and mysticism, as it often happens upon consuming statistically meaningful amounts of mead samples, blanks, etc. - fortunately, it's not distilling, thus no methanol, not even once blind!), we've came up with ultimately awesome slow release nutrient: almonds! Just 1g of slightly cracked (not crushed, or you'll regret it) nuts per liter, let them float, separate on secondary fermentation or on bottling, does not matter much. ABV 14+ easily and reliably.
Other nuts we checked (we've looked into quite a lot, hazels included) are nutritious too, but release noticeable amounts of oil. Pine nuts are of special note, they made yeast go crazy overboard, but the product was barely drinkable due to bitterness, oiliness, and general skew.
For nutrition, it seems, nitrogen and vegetable oil are equally important. According to Dr. White, addition of fatty acids to yeast as nutrient promotes cell wall growth, even to the point that it might be possible to achieve efficient exponential growth with very low oxygen content. Nitrogen available from almonds proteins is slowly released and (I suppose) makes yeast adjust cellular machinery to actually process complex materials into its own proteins. So, it's balanced diet!
And, as another, even more natural approach, - don't refine honey too much, let some pollen go through. Pollen is pretty much most appropriate protein rich nutrient in existence, and it also imparts lots of flavor, naturally.
There you go. Very simple stuff.
Now here the most suspicious part is yeast nutrient. Like any fertilizer, it does turn into poison when used excessively, especially in first hours of adaptation when cell machinery is being adjusted to new environment. One hour starter is too short even for 1 budding, but induces extra state transition stress onto yeast. Proper starter time should be at least 6 hours, 24 is recommended, to drive yeast to exponential-plateau transition region. Short starters are useful for rehydration of dry yeast; of course, no budding or multiplication happens there - and thus best medium for dry yeast rehydration is sterile (or boiled) water with no food nor nutrient.
Nutrient dosage might be surprisingly hard problem in small volumes, as many products are powdered mixtures of various compounds, naturally as homogeneous as you've mixed them, and with size of particles getting close to size of dose, it's easy to skew composition just by sampling.
You've probably got around 40% sugar in that syrup solution, which is higher than what I use for sweet mead recipes. I'm not sure lager yeast can tolerate this gravity, although it could, I was just planning to explore that dimention this year, mead on beer yeast.
Neither of this explains later yeasts not starting, unless there was enough nutrient to make whole batch salty. Let me know if I can help you troubleshooting this system further, I'm sad and curious now.