What are your techniques for getting honey flavor in a beer?

Are you kegging? If so, after lagering, hit it with sorbate and back sweeten. Keep it cold and you should be fine.

 

Honey malt does indeed taste like honey. Which shouldn't be strange I guess. I have used it, not expecting to get much honey but then again I'm not a malt wizard by any stretch.

Mead tastes a little like honey. Sometimes. Some more than others, and I find a lot of mead tastes a bit like chemical wine but not honey. Find one you like and you can add that to your taste prior to packaging.

As @MrOH states, keep it cold and the yeast will not do much of anything. But you must be able to keep the beer cold at all times. Just add honey.

Adding honey at FO will boil off most of the aromas you are looking for. These volatiles are, well, volatile, and will go away well below 212F. But it will smell great at the time. Honey is pretty much sterile so no worries. Just add what you like after cooling.

I have made Mead, you really should spend a moment finding a honey you like. The different varieties are quite distinct. Clover honey, wildflower honey, buckwheat honey, they are all different.

Cheers

 

I've never gotten Honey flavors from melanoidin malt.

 

You might be overdoing it with so many ingredients in the mash, if you really want to mix so many, I'd keep their total to around five percent of the total malt and keep the base malt at 95%. If you do otherwise then it might not be very tasty, too much specialty malt is usually a bad idea.

There are a lot of tricks that could help, like adding potassium metabisulfite after the fermentation and then adding honey so that the yeast are dead and can't ferment it; but I'd avoid all of that if I were you.

Just build a recipe with 95% 2 row barley malt, 5% honey malt, and choose an appropriate yeast for your style and setup. Avoid hops as much as possible, maybe a small amount, and fining at the end will clarify it. No real need for adjuncts if you brew it carefully



https://brulosophy.com/2016/10/24/g...oidin-malt-vs-honey-malt-exbeeriment-results/

 

That's sort of how Sack Meads (high alcohol, usually sweet) are often made, i.e. by relying on the ABV tolerance limit of the yeast strain. Sometimes they are fed incrementally, as you're contemplating. Sometimes not.