Hard Lemon Soda.

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It can make a lovely lemonade, but it's very good if you add some ginger to it too :D
A lovely Summer drink.....just don't seal the bottles if you have any thoughts that there's still any fermentation at all.
 
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Ive always liked the idea of home made lemonade but its too sugary.

It is if you make it up to that recipe, but if you make barley water and add lemon, then it's a lovely drink and it doesn't need all that sugar.

This is an original Victorian (probably earlier, but by Victorian times oranges were fairly common, not just for the wealthy) recipe for Lemon or Orange Barley water.....note; no sugar added at all :)


It will ferment too though, the yeast will manage on the barley....just be careful not to seal the bottle too tight; it might explode.
 
When I was but a toddling weevil, I only narrowly escaped some exploding ginger beer. This talk of fermentation and explosion is making me a bit a twitchy.:runaway:
 
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I know I keep hammering on about it, but in a glass bottle it's lethal.

I gave a bottle to a neighbour with the clear instruction that it was lively and to mind and release the gas.
He drank half and put the bottle away in the cupboard.
His wife was ironing just in front of that cupboard when the bottle exploded. I had used glass Irn Bru bottles, thought they'd be safe enough since they were meant for ginger/pop/fizzy stuff anyway.
The top of the bottle went up like a rocket and punched a dinner plate sized piece out of the two inch thick worktop and bounced that on the ceiling. The exploding glass in the cupboard took out whisky, beer, wine, etc., and the mess of shattered glass and booze was utterly unbelievable......and left a traumatised neighbour shaking like a leaf.
If it hadn't been in the cupboard when it blew, the glass could have been incredibly dangerous.
We got lucky, we got very lucky.

Please learn from this; it's all too easy to cause hurt and damage with fermenting liquids with no gas exit.
 
Try looking up Kilju. Typically made from ordinary granulated sugar, a few raisins or sultanas per litre and often a teabag per gallon demijohn. Use a suitable strain of yeast and you can ferment out all the sugar and get up to 14% to 18% alcohol.

I used to brew my own wine and beer; I made my first beer when I was about 13, from an 8 pint kit, using my late grandad's gear.

I've never had a bottle of homebrew explode on me, but I once had an unfortunate incident with an airlock... I'd not filtered out all the skins from the elderberries, the must frothed up with the skins on top, that blocked the airlock until the pressure got high enough to blow the wad of skins all the way through, hitting the white ceiling.

ETA: I just remembered an unfortunate explosion in the cellar earlier this year: a bottle of farmhouse cider from Normandy. Fermentation must have restarted or maybe just never stopped and the pressure built up enough. Maybe there was a slight weakness in the glass... we'll never know. But the pressure was enough to blow the bottom off the bottle.
 
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I know I keep hammering on about it, but in a glass bottle it's lethal.

I gave a bottle to a neighbour with the clear instruction that it was lively and to mind and release the gas.
He drank half and put the bottle away in the cupboard.
His wife was ironing just in front of that cupboard when the bottle exploded. I had used glass Irn Bru bottles, thought they'd be safe enough since they were meant for ginger/pop/fizzy stuff anyway.
The top of the bottle went up like a rocket and punched a dinner plate sized piece out of the two inch thick worktop and bounced that on the ceiling. The exploding glass in the cupboard took out whisky, beer, wine, etc., and the mess of shattered glass and booze was utterly unbelievable......and left a traumatised neighbour shaking like a leaf.
If it hadn't been in the cupboard when it blew, the glass could have been incredibly dangerous.
We got lucky, we got very lucky.

Please learn from this; it's all too easy to cause hurt and damage with fermenting liquids with no gas exit.
Is it something particular for ginger beer? Eldest son was making various alcoholic ginger beers, one bottle in hot press - in an old soda stream bottle - went pop as well. Now he had been burping them, maybe why not as destructive as your story, and lucky I’d insisted he put the bottles in a plastic box. A messy carry on all the same.
 
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Is it something particular for ginger beer? Eldest son was making various alcoholic ginger beers, one bottle in hot press - in an old soda stream bottle - went pop as well. Now he had been burping them, maybe why not as destructive as your story, and lucky I’d insisted he put the bottles in a plastic box. A messy carry on all the same.

I honestly don't know; I do know that ginger is renowned for blowing up though. Elderflower is the other one that is dangerous if the gas is trapped.

We actually call fizzy juices/pop/soda generically Ginger here. A bottle of ginger could be any flavour, just the fizzy stuff is called ginger.
 
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I honestly don't know; I do know that ginger is renowned for blowing up though. Elderflower is the other one that is dangerous if the gas is trapped.

We actually call fizzy juices/pop/soda generically Ginger here. A bottle of ginger could be any flavour, just the fizzy stuff is called ginger.
Ah the hidden delights of a voddy ‘n’ ginger
 
I honestly don't know; I do know that ginger is renowned for blowing up though. Elderflower is the other one that is dangerous if the gas is trapped.
My dad's cider. We were warned not to go in the garage on really hot days, you could hear them popping.

Corks were wired Champagne style. The well chilled bottle had to have the cork released by snipping the wire, absolutely fraught with danger and the cause of several chunks of Artex to be missing from my college dorm ceiling :D
 
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You know it’s going to be a good cider when it’s also technically a section 1 firearm.
Lol. One college bash involved me driving an hour or so back home to do a raid on the garage. I nicked a whole crate of a dozen bottles and returned to the party. Sort of a cider Claymore, nobody got a drop to drink, each bottle erupted like Vesuvius up onto the ceiling.
 
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I remember that among my grandad's home brew kit were some screw-on bottle tops with a little cylinder on top, this had a hole in the wall with a small, strong rubber band over it; if the pressure built up inside the bottle, the gas could force its way out through that hole.

Apparently there a bloke called Pat Mack who makes YouTube videos about home brewing rocket fuel on the cheap and he sells "Pat Mack's Home Brewing Caps" that, though a different design, do a similar job to an airlock.
 

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