Hard Lemonade - Easy Brew Day

All you need to make hard lemonade.

My friend is currently on a Mike's Hard Lemonade kick.  It's a little concerning how much he likes them. I figure it would be a bit more tolerable if he was drinking home brewed hard lemonade. So, as a thank you for making the wine in my wooden barrel that will soon be aging Flanders Red Ale and for 2lbs of FREE raspberries from his backyard (those berries are expensive fresh!) – I figured I could make him a case of Hard Lemonade.

I've never made it before and thought it would be really easy.  But, after reading up on the brewing blogs, it seems it can be somewhat difficult due to the acidity in all of the lemonade you need to use.  The yeast can get stressed out from the acidity an leave some nasty off-flavors or the must (juice) will just take a very long time to ferment out the sugars since the yeast is struggling in that highly acidic environment.

I decided to go for it and brew a straight lemonade with no additional fruit juice or fresh fruit added for additional flavoring.  Here is the recipe I ended up with:

1.25 lbs Extra Light DME
1.25 lbs Cane Sugar
4.5 oz Malto Dextrine
4 jars of frozen Lemonade - no preservatives

Putt all of your ingredients into a 1.5 gallon of boiling water and boil for 15 minutes.
Cool the wort down to about 100 degrees and then add to your primary bucket with another gallon of cold water.  Top off to three gallons as needed.    Measure the gravity.  You need to make sure that your gravity is within the range of the yeast you plan to use.  This recipe with the lemonade I used came in at 1.064.  This will come in at least 7% and probably even higher once it's finished.

I used regular dry ale yeast - Safale US-05. I did not want it to ferment all the way out so I decided against the Champagne yeast.  I also added yeast energizer at 1tsp per gallon of lemonade.  This is to help the yeast battle through the acidity.

After about 18 hours the airlock was firing away and it went strong for about 4 days.  I will be moving it to a secondary for a quick rest before bottling.  More to come once I have the final gravity and it's in the bottle.