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.

Mead

So for Christmas last year I bought my friend a Mr. Beer brewer's kit at Target because it was $20 and I hadn't seen a system for under $50 before.

The beer - some IPA - was pretty bad, and he forgot about the system until I was daydreaming about having two carboys set up for different recipes. Well, we remembered it and decided to make 2 gal of mead with his system.

Ingredients:
Honey
Water
Champagne yeast

We boiled the water, brought it just under boiling, and then added our honey. We let that almost simmer for about half an hour (usually a bit over) to mimic pasteurization without actually boiling it to remove the flavor of the honey. We also skimmed off as much as we could of what formed over the top. Then we just cooled it out back (on a cold night in Chicago, we didn't feel like preparing an ice bath) with lids, and stuck it in the carboy. I had attempted to get a yeast colony going, but probably should have done it the day before. Oh well.

Now we're going to let it sit for about a month, bottle it, and not drink it for a very long time.