Starters and sulfites

I mashed in a couple pounds of pale ale malt to turn into 2 starters for Berber's imperial red ale, and my upcoming chocolate stout. I wish I still had malt extract laying around, it would have saved me a lot of time. I also boiled 4 liters of must to get starters going for the other meads. Also, I broke the top off of a glass fermenter. Hopefully I can still use it. Now I am trying to sand down a bunch of rubber bungs so they fit in the one gallon fermenters. Its taking forever since the batteries on this drill die every 3 minutes. Hopefully itll pay off and I'll have 5 one gallon batches of mead going in the next couple days, as well as Berber's imperial red ale finishing out and me starting my chocolate stout.
I was doing more reading on melomels, and it seems that blackberries can make a melomel turn out very tart and acidic. There are two remedies that Compleat Meadmaker Ken Schramm offers for this: add sulfites to the mead when you want fermentation to cease, and then add more honey so the sweetness counteracts the tartness. Once the sulfites have been added, this extra honey will not ferment. The other option he mentioned is to add bacteria to do a malolactic fermentation at the end, which will smooth out the tartness. Since this is only a first batch, I will probably go for the sulfites. It sounds like sulfites would take less time, be cheaper, and more effective. Maybe some day I will go for a malolactic fermentation if I want a dry mead but it turns more acidic than I'd like.

(L to R) Irish Ale Yeast starter for the chocolate stout, California Ale Yeast starter to finish off berbers imperial red, and a gallon and a half of mead starter split into 2 jugs.