Making Use Of A Tree Full Of Lemons

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sinkas

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Hiall,
After a search of this site, I have not found any reference to brewing a lemonade, or a lemon beer other than a Radler....

I have a large tree full of lemons that never get used ( well only a few in cooking) and I would like to put them to work.

I thought I might just juice them all, and boil it up with some pale malt, and see what happens?

Does anyone remeber Two Dogs alcoholic brewed lemonade and orange.

Anyone have any experiences or suggestions to make?

Cheers

Case
 
Hi there Doc,

God only knows how I missed that thread,

Cheers,

Case
 
No problem.

I have a two trees full of lemons and one full of oranges. I should have another crack at making an alcholic lemonade. The good side effect is the boiler comes up sparkling clean :p

Beers,
Doc
 
Hi Case

At the risk of swamping you with negativity, here are two more attempts at hard lemonade that werent that successful with the punters. The problem, as ever, is getting some residual sweetness in there to make it taste the way people expect lemonade to. And of course if bottle conditioning the yeast just eats it, unless you use lactose or artificial sweetener, neither of which taste very nice. I am currently setting up kegs and will try again by killing fermentation half way through then force carbonating. Both my attempts tasted great mid-fermentation and overly dry at the end.



7% and a bit aley and dry

5% and a bit winey and dry
 
I just dragged one of my second batch of lemonade out of cold storage, looks and tastes like goon.

I got to thinking about how one of the suggestions for home brewed cider is to drink it mixed with fresh juice to sweeten it a little, why not do the equivalent for lemonade? Make up some sugar syrup on the stove, chill it and add a few mL to each glass of lemonade, like cordial. Heck, I remember around 5 years ago there were these trendy semi-premix drinks available that had a little test tube of alcohol attached to them that you threw into the bottle. Same principle, different substance.
 
From all reports good lemonade from scratch is hard to make.

I reckon focus your efforts on making good limoncello which is easily achieveable and worth the efforts.

Will
 
sinkas said:
Hiall,
After a search of this site, I have not found any reference to brewing a lemonade, or a lemon beer other than a Radler....

I have a large tree full of lemons that never get used ( well only a few in cooking) and I would like to put them to work.
[post="63161"][/post]​
Have you considered ginger beer - most recipes use quite a bit of lemon.

One I have brewed can be viewed at http://brewiki.org/brewsta/recipes/?sys=si...rBeer.beer=view

I have also had one or two cracks at lemonade but haven't been particularly thrilled with the outcome and just wasn't motivated to tweak it to where I wanted it.

cheers
 
Kai said:
I just dragged one of my second batch of lemonade out of cold storage, looks and tastes like goon.

I got to thinking about how one of the suggestions for home brewed cider is to drink it mixed with fresh juice to sweeten it a little, why not do the equivalent for lemonade? Make up some sugar syrup on the stove, chill it and add a few mL to each glass of lemonade, like cordial. Heck, I remember around 5 years ago there were these trendy semi-premix drinks available that had a little test tube of alcohol attached to them that you threw into the bottle. Same principle, different substance.
[post="63213"][/post]​


Kai - was gonna try it myself - little set back - was going to use 500g lactose in the boiling stage - and cut out the use of the white flesh of the lemons -- thoughts ?
maybe add a couple of oranges
 
gregc said:
Kai - was gonna try it myself - little set back - was going to use 500g lactose in the boiling stage - and cut out the use of the white flesh of the lemons -- thoughts ?
maybe add a couple of oranges
[post="68816"][/post]​


Greg,

The lactose will certainly give the lemonade more body, but it won't sweeten it up too much. Lactose isn't very sweet.

Cutting out the pith is a good idea as it contains a lot of bitter compounds, but I'm not too sure about using oranges. They also contain a lot of compounds that can be quite bitter, especially if fermented.
 
Lactose is gnerally reported as being about 1/5 as sweet as sugar, and if you suck on a spoon full of the stuff you can see this is about right. So if it tastes like it needs a lot of sugar, then it needs 5 times a lot = shitloads of lactose. And shitloads is a pretty good description of the effect on a lot of people if you hand them a drink with that much lactose in it. Just an observation from lemonade attempts.
 
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