Next Up - Bottling Mead and Brewing Hard Lemonade

So the approaching summer caused my wife to make a request - hard lemonade.

We decided to use the smaller Mr. Beer carboy for this test recipe, but that means that we'll have to bottle the mead.

So my friend and his girlfriend are contributing to our bottle fund (which is nice because the bottles are over at his place, as it is his Mr. Beer kit), and he is hitting up the Brew and Grow for the 1 pound of ultra-light Dried Malt Extract (DME).

Right now, it looks like our recipe is going to be:

1.5 lbs white sugar (an extra .5 for a bit of an extra kick :)
1/2 lb ultra-light DME
1/2 packet champagne yeast (left over from the mead)
5 cans of lemonade concentrate (without potassium sorbate which apparently keeps the yeast from reacting)

Another thing I will definitely be doing this time is starting the yeast - 2 cups of warm water, 1/2 packet of yeast, and 2 Tbsp of cane sugar. Once that starts to foam, I'll begin putting in half cups of the lemonade concentrate/water/sugar/DME wort every 10 minutes for a half an hour - making sure it's still active.

Once that's all together, we'll toss it all in the carboy and make sure it's 2.5 gallons.

We have yet to decide if we're going to carbonate the lemonade or not, but we'll get to that after the 5 weeks of fermentation.