Looking for some advice on lemonade and the difficulty of getting lemonade to carb up

Hi all,

I made my first traditional style lemonade recently, I made ginger beer, orangeade and lemonade. The ginger carbed up within 24hours, the orangeade within 48 and I'm still waiting almost 120 days later on the lemonade, I even repitched with wine yeast.
I think the high acidity of the lemonade inhibited the yeast, any tips on this from anyone?

Eoin

EoinMag said:

Hi all,

I made my first traditional style lemonade recently, I made ginger beer, orangeade and lemonade. The ginger carbed up within 24hours, the orangeade within 48 and I'm still waiting almost 120 days later on the lemonade, I even repitched with wine yeast.
I think the high acidity of the lemonade inhibited the yeast, any tips on this from anyone?

Eoin

Click to expand...

The Hard Lemonade's I have made were very slow to start (fermentation). If you used "Wine" yeast, what yeast was it? Some strains will not do well with high acid environments. I use D-47 on my batches and usually have good results, albeit slow starts.

If you are out to 120 days, are you refering to bottle conditioning or fermentation? Thats a long time in a fermenter with no CO2 layer of protection on the Lemonade. Have you checked your S.G. with a hydrometer?

Salute!

Given that your soda isn't carbing I would suspect you are correct about the acidity. Would you mind posting your recipe? Maybe someone here can give some experiential advice.

My first thought would be a blend soda, say Ginger Lemon. Then you would have the bite/tartness you are looking for and maybe better carbing.

The advice already given about your yeast would be another start. Research some yeast strains and their tolerance to acidity/low pH environments.

120days is definitely extreme for a soda. You could look into force carbing with Carbing Caps. There are commercial versions, but someone here posted how they made their own with tire stems and CO2 hand-cartridge systems.

Good luck

oops
I just looked back there
it says 120 days
that should read 10, I fat fingered that.
lol sorry.

I started by using an opened pack of cider yeast that I spread among all the sodas, like I said, 4 of them worked.
When the other two didn't work I decided to try the KV1116 that I have there, so I opened a pack of that, still no joy.
This weekend I opened one to check on progress and have a go at it, I ended up mixing it with vodka when we were having a session, it was good, but only very very very lightly carbed.

recipe was kinda winging it based on an uncarbed lemonade I've made before and the taste. I used 9 lemons to make 2X2 litre batches.

Juice of 4.5 lemons
1 cup of sugar
A small grate of ginger
Yeast

Topped up with water and in a 2 litre plastic bottle, put into clothes press where it's warm and the others worked within 48 hours at the latest.

Update on this one, my other half msn'd me at work today and asked if that was lemonade in the airing cupboard and I realised I'd forgotten about this after the repitch.
I told her to put it in the fridge and I'd test it later. It took it about 10 days but it's finally carbed up quite nicely.
Patience can be a virtue with the sodas too it would appear, but it got there eventually and it's delicious.