I just got back from out of town, so I'm sorry I haven't posted yet. We were out cruising in my friend's "big boat" on Lake Superior and having a few homebrews. What a great time!
Here's the original recipe:
hard lemonade . . 5 gallons
lemonade concentrate for 5 gallons
5 lbs sugar
champagne yeast
dissolve the sugar in water, mix up the lemonade, add the champagne yeast and let it go .
This really wasn't very complete, so I used this one and scaled it to 5 gallons, by mixing up frozen lemonade, water and sugar to 5 gallons using this as a guideline:
(This recipe yields 3 gallons of Hard Lemonade)
7 cans of lemonade concentrate ( I used 10 cans)
Sugar to an SG of 1.100 (1.5 pounds per gallon, more or less)
water to 3 gallons (I filled to 5)
3 tsp yeast nutrient (I used 5)
3 tsp yeast energizer (I used 5)
3 crushed Campden tablets or 1/2 tsp K-meta (again, 5 crushed campden)
Wine yeast (Cotes de blanc)
And here are my notes:
What I did on 5/6/06:
In 1/4 or so warm water, sprinkled cotes de blanc yeast. Added some yeast nutrient. When looking and smelling yeasty, I added some sugar water and lemonade mixture. All the sugar was disolved in about 1/3 of the water, with a can of lemonade mixed in. I added 1/4 c of this mixture to my yeast mix, and then added some more water and lemonade to the primary so that about ½ the water or less is in the primary with all of the sugar and 1/3 of the cans of lemonade. I took some of this out of the primary and put it in a measuring cup, and I’ll gradually add that to the yeast. I’ll add the rest of the cans of the thawed lemonade and the rest of the water tomorrow. S.g is 1.080, at the start after all ingredients are added.
If you need help translating this, I'll be glad to help out.
Jim, it is not too late to add sugar! But, remember, that as soon as you add sugar, you'll restart fermentation. So, if you have sorbate and metasulfite, and that first to stabilize. Then mix 2 cups sugar to 1 cup water and boil until dissolved and add that a little at a time to a small sample of your lemonade. When it tastes right, take the s.g. and see where it is. Then, sweeten the whole batch to that s.g. I did prefer mine sweetened, about to 1.020 if I remember correctly.
Here is the actual thread where I found it- It's very long but helpful:
http://www.winepress.us/forums/index.php?showtopic=1156&hl=
Carbonated hard lemonade is good! I made mine still, but I like both. let me know if you need any more suggestions.
Lorena