Hard Lemonade Procedure

Tonight, we dance! And make hard lemonade.

Going off this recipe, we made several modifications to fully utilize our 1-gallon carboys.

We purchased 5 cans of frozen generic brand lemonade concentrate, 2 cans of pink lemonade, 2 cans of limeade, and 1 can of pomegranite raspberry. The recipe called for 2 pounds of sugar, plus or minus to taste, so we added 3. We heated about a gallon and a half of water, and dissolved all the sugar in there, poured it into a 5 gallon carboy, and added enough water to make 5 gallons. At that point the SG was 1.032. Before adding more sugar, we added the DME, which clumped and was a pain to mix in.

We ended up skimming all the clumps off the top and heating them in some wort to help dissolve it. Once that was fully mixed in, the SG was 1.042. We then took the individual cans of frozen concentrate and began putting them in the carboy to spread out the surface area and help warm them up faster.

1 - Blueberry pomegranite lemonade - SG - 1.080 (the really dark one)
2 - Lemonade - SG - 1.082 (has writing 'B Lock' on it)
3 - Lemonade 2 - SG - 1.080 (has letter 'C' on neck)
4 - Limeade - SG - 1.076 (has letter 'A' on neck)
5 - Pink Lemonade - SG - 1.082 (the pink one)

As part of the control, I will be taking 2 home and putting them in my basement - hopefully a more stable, and lower temperature than what Chicago has in for us in the next few days. The other 3 will reside in Nova's closet.

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.