Hard lemonade with no activity

I just made a batch of hard lemonade with the following ingredients.

~~Ingredients~~
10# Regular Cane Sugar
7 Containers off brand lemonade concentrate
3 Containers limeade OR pink lemonade concentrate
1pkt EC-1118
1 tbls Energizer
1 tbls Nutrient
Water to 6 Gallons

My wife was helping me for the first time and she pitched the yeast while the must was still a little too warm around 95 degrees F. Did she cook the yeast? I have not seen any activity and it has been around 14 hours since pitching. I am not really familiar with wine yeast as I have only brewed beer up to this point. How long should I wait before re-pitching? I have it currently at 72 degrees F. Thanks.

My only wine batch was apfelwein and it took awhile to take off then showed airlock activity slow and steadily for like 4+ weeks.

95 F is pretty warm for pitching but I'd still be patient and wait a couple days then check it out and get a gravity reading.

1) Patience. Wait 72 hours, and if there's no change in gravity, then it's not fermenting. Having a bubbling airlock and a vessel full of foam doesn't mean it isn't fermenting!

2) I did the same thing once and, like you may have, killed the yeast. Adding more solved it.

Err... the Lemon Conentrate? do you have a specific product link, brand, size? That seems aweful strong for what you're doing. I use almost 10# for a single 5gal batch of skeeter pee. (leftover gets used for backsweetening). That only uses 3 bottles lemon juice.

Did you make the invert by boiling the sugar? Is that where the temperature came from?

1 pack of yeast will take a while to get going as well. I usually use 2 dry packs on a 5gal batch if not using slurry.

It was frozen lemonade and limeade from Wal-mart. I will give it two days and check the gravity. Thanks.

nitsuj80 said:

It was frozen lemonade and limeade from Wal-mart. I will give it two days and check the gravity. Thanks.

Click to expand...

I don't think you'll get it going if you just pitched the yeast and are waiting. It's a tough, tough, ferment due to the acidity of the must. It takes a yeast starter and lots of pampering plus lots of yeast to get it going.

If you take a look at my recipe (under my avatar under recipes), I describe a good way to get it going.