Hard Lemonade & Limeade

I saw this post over on HomeBrewTalk.com about Hard Lemonade and was intrigued enough to try it out. On Saturday I started a 2 gallon batch of Limeade and a 1 gallon batch of lemonade. I was a went ahead and used table sugar for this recipe because it was what I had on hand. I estimated that it's going to be around 20-25% of fermentable sugars, so hopefully that won't be an issue.

One word of caution: I used extra light malt extract like the recipe calls for, but used light malt extract in my yeast starter. When I added that to the fermenters, it had a much greater effect on the color than I thought it would, darkening the liquid quite a bit. I'm sure the taste won't be changed too much, but if you're worried about how it looks, you might want to make sure to use extra light DME in your starter as well.

After I made my starter and let the yeast do it's thing in the wort alone, I added a little bit of the lemonade mixture every 5 minutes or so for about 30 minutes. This supposedly allows the yeast to slowly acclimate to the acidity of the lemonade that it will ultimately be living in. Then I used half of the starter in both the lemonade and limeade.

The limeade took off within hours, but the lemonade took a couple of days. I thought that was odd since the lemonade was what I used to "acclimate" the yeast, but it could just be that when splitting between the two I didn't do an even divide.

Recipe transcribed from HomeBrewTalk.com. This is for 5 gallons. I scaled mine down to 2 and 1 gallon batches.

Hard Lemonade

5 gallons of water
10 cans Lemonade Concentrate (Check label to make sure there is no potassium sorbate)
2 pounds Sugar
1 pound Ultra Light DME
1 pack Champagne Yeast

Ferment, add potassium sorbate when finished gravity is reached, enjoy.


UPDATE - 11/9/2009

Bottled about two weeks ago. Most was still, so we broke into it after a very short bottle conditioning period. Its nearly all gone now. If you like sour (and I do) this is for you. There's no sweetness left at all, so all of the sourness from the limes/lemons shine through. I was able to snap one picture of a glass of limeade. It has a hint of green, but they are both almost the same color:


I definitely will be making this again. Probably in the spring to be ready for the summer (if not before). This would be perfect to drink ice cold on our building's rooftop deck on a hot day.