Reads like a grad school thesis padded to meet the length requirement. Dense and stilted; in half the space it could have contained all the same information and had room left over for a few hundred more recipes. This might be helpful for someone who churns out a dozen batches a year, but for a beginner it is excessively and inappropriately vague. Here is the crux of the melomel chapter: "you can add fruit or juice to your mead, but it's difficult to say how much because everyone's tastes are different." ...and he took 19 pages to say it.
The grape chapter is similar, as is spice chapter. You just saved yourself 60 pages tedious "I can't tell you what to do".
Another hint about beginners: they aren't going to be travelling halfway across the country to look up one of the artisanal honey suppliers referenced; they're going to go to the local warehouse super store and buy two mega-jugs of Sue-Bee for half [or less] the price. Save the two pages of trivial distinctions between honey sources for the hypernosmic snob. Beginners won't use this.
Beginners don't need a ponderous treatise full of data; they need to know what to do. "What" is answered by recipes, of which there are a grand total of 11 - at the far end of the book.
Next they need to know how to do it. Let's face it: "how" is not terribly difficult. Iron age bumpkins who knew nothing about biology or chemistry managed to make mead, so an average high school graduate can be told how in less than the 150 pages Schramm takes. Those curious about experimenting also need to why. "Why" can be understood by a 7th-grader with a short course on the relevant biology and chemistry.
Choose a different book to start your mead making hobby.
