Hard Lemonade

Degsy

Just bottled up a batch of this brew.
Basically its lemons,sugar and water fermented together to give a basic lemonade with an alcoholic twist.
I used:
Ten lemons,squeezed and sliced.
One kilo of white sugar
Ten litres of water
Champagne yeast.
I left it to ferment using a brew belt for 12 days but i dont have a hydrometer to measure the alcoholic content..at them moment it tastes very refreshing and lemony and i intend to keep it for a few weeks at least to condition.
Anybody any thoughts or ideas?

rubadub

I once fermented red lemonade, most soft drinks have about the same sugar content as apple juice -around 10-11%. It came out reasonably OK. It might be too acidic to take off well so you could always add the bulk of the lemon juice at the end.

I think there was some commercial stuff out there years ago. You can make a neutral brew with just sugar water & nutrient & yeast. This can be cleared and fined and treated with activated carbon and then filtered again. Now you have a pretty tasteless "wine" base that you can add flavourings to -this is pretty much what many alcopops do.

You can get these neutral brews up to quite high % in a short brew time. In the past 10 years they have come a long way, they call them turbo yeasts. Many are developed with distillation in mind -brewing with just sugar means there is essentially no methanol produced and off flavours or other compounds are minimised. The activated carbon will reduce a lot of off-flavours too.

Cheap baileys knock offs often have "wine" in them, which I reckon is treated sugar washes. You can get those liquer kits but they cost a fortune compared to using turbos and your own charcoal.

Degsy

More about turbo yeast here.

HMD

i might try that lemonade recipe the weekend

Degsy

rubadub wrote: »

I once fermented red lemonade, most soft drinks have about the same sugar content as apple juice -around 10-11%. It came out reasonably OK. .

Stupid question probably but what did you do to ferment the lemonade..i was looking in tesco and they had six litres for 2 euro or something like that,do you think its worth a whirl?What did it taste like?

rubadub

I just put in some wine nutrient and wine yeast. I did add a tiny bit of sugar but it reacts like those mentos diet coke bombs, if it was allowed go flat this would not happen, but as I said it is already ~11% sugar so enough for 5-6%.

I did not expect it to take off so quick, I though the preservatives and CO2 would have really hampered the yeast.

It tasted OK, just like I would have expected, lemonade taste still. It was a 3L country spring red lemonade, we got them cheap and figured we could use them for storing wine -the bottles are far cheaper than demijohns even if you dump it out, same with 5L bottled water. So instead of dumping we tried it, country spring is manky lemonade anyways.

I would like to try again, maybe with a decent diet drink so it would retain sweetness, but obviously it needs sugar so should be flat first. I might give it a go with coke zero.

Thinking about it now I should save up my coke zeros, i.e. when I get to the last 300-500ml in a 2L bottle I often dump it as it has gone flat -so this is win-win, flat coke that would have otherwise gone to waste. Coke has phosphoric acid instead of citric, dunno how yeast would take it. You could always add a little baking soda to neutralise it a bit.

Degsy

Decided to have a pop at that today.
I got 6 litres of country spring red lemonade and 4 litres of diet white lemonade.
.
I put the red in a saucepan to heat it up and drive the co2 out of it and mixed in a kilo of sugar..put this in the fermenter and added the white lemonade..the whole lot was just above blood temperature when i added the yeast and its going like mad now.

Gonna leave it 12 days or so and see what occurs.

The ingredients in tesco cost 2.50 for 6 litres of red and 1.70 for 4 litres of white lemonade,and 90 cent for the sugar!

Kid Charlemagne

Well Degsy - how did it turn out?
Drinkable?

Degsy

Kid Charlemagne wrote: »

Well Degsy - how did it turn out?
Drinkable?

Havnt had a chance to taste it yet..gonna bottle it up tommorow and have a wee taste then.

Okies so i backsweetened a few days ago and added some glucose then decanted into my secondary vessel.
I bottled it back into the original bottles i got the lemonade in(sanitised of course) and had a bit of a taste..the results were surprisingly palatable..you can taste the lemonade flavour and there's a kick from the booze as well although i only tried a glassful.

Gonna leave it in my "booze cupboard" for a few weeks to carbonate and clear out.