My wife’s uncle has a really prolific Meyer lemon tree and gave us a big bag of them. Ripe citrus will go bad pretty quickly so had to come up with some uses. I made some orange wine last year and have made lemon wine before using a modified Skeeter Pee recipe so decided to revamp my orange wine recipe for lemon and skip the Skeeter Pee recipe altogether which has too many silly steps for a small batch and uses potassium sorbate. A properly fermented juice wine with champagne yeast will be completely dry and stable making the use of any preservative unnecessary unless you want to have some residual body and cut the fermentation before terminal gravity. I prefer these wines bone dry and served cold. You can sparkle them too by priming the bottles just like a beer. Just remember the gravity should be 1.000 or less or you will have a bottle bomb! Use the Lallemand EC-118 Champagne yeast. It is fast starting, tolerates temperature swings and a high alcohol environment up to around 18% abv. If doing one gallon no need to start it – just pitch the yeast. It will literally start in a half hour.
1 Gallon
Estimated OG: 1.083
Estimated FG: 0.998
Estimated Color: 1.7 SRM
Brewhouse Efficiency: 100.00 %
ABV: 13.4%
Ingredients
1 lb lemon juice by weight (this is for brewing calculations only) which the equivalent of 1 pint of fresh squeezed juice or about 10 good sized lemons
1.75 lb table sugar
1/2 tsp yeast nutrient
Lalvin EC-1118 (Champagne yeast)
Method
- Squeeze lemons and strain out pips.
- Add .75 gallon water to pot and add lemon juice and sugar (this should yield about 1.25 gallons).
- Stir sugar till dissolved.
- Turn on heat and pasteurize(161F) or bring to boil and shut off heat.
- Cool to 75 and transfer to sanitized 1 gallon fermenter and pitch room temperature dry yeast directly to wine and add airlock.
- Swirl fermenter occasionally.
- Let ferment at least 7-14 days and rack off lees to another sanitized 1 gallon fermenter and check gravity. If gravity is good (at least 1.000) let yeast settle out for one week by crash cooling(small enough to put in your fridge). If not at terminal gravity let ferment another week and check gravity again by racking off lees. A double transfer will give you a clearer wine but it is not necessary if crashed cooled – this yeast should form a compact sediment bed you can pour off of.
- Bottle either still or carbonate by priming to 2 volumes and let condition at room temperature for at least a month, preferably 3. More age will smooth this wine out!