14 days after bottling, I’m ready to test one out. I know I said I was going to let it go longer, but I can’t wait to see if I’ve got beer bottle bombs in my basement.
Some of these yeasts can ferment very slowly, which can lull you into a false sense of security before they explode after more than a month of conditioning, leaving a gallon of mead on your floor and glass shards jutting out of your drywall - but I digress.
This unbottling however, was nothing if not uneventful. So uneventful in fact, that I decided to reduce the whole video down to two gifs.
A very tame opening, but light carbonation could be heard crackling and fizzing once the lid was off.
Another sign of heavy carbonation is rapid and volatile foam (think champagne), which we do not have here. To be honest, I’m a bit disappointed with the level of carbonation; it seems I went way under on the priming sugar. It’s still got that effervescent fizzy quality, I just love when I can get a heavy carbonation on it.
Flavor-wise, this is a win. It’s a bit sour because we ran it out of sugar, but it’s got a light crispness to it that you lose in a sweet hard lemonade. Ultimately this is pretty close to middle, leaning only gently towards the sour side.
The fermented Turkey Hill Lemonade is nicely balanced I’d say, and I won’t have any problem drinking this up. I do think I will play around a bit more with the canaries and the gallon growler. We’ll save that for a time when we can really get into it, but I’m thinking we’ll do a second phase for half of this batch, adding more sugar to each bottle, perhaps in varying amounts (this time we’ll measure). The information won’t be as useful as if I’d measured before dumping in sugar the first time, but one day I’ll grow up…maybe.
Thanks for checking out the Turkey Hill Lemonade fermentation experiment, there’ll definitely be more to come on this in the near future.
