ELI5… I keep seeing it for sale, and googling it just confuses me more. What is the “brewing” process to make lemonade?
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I think this has something to do with geography. Where I’m from most lemonades are essentially carbonated sodas. Sprite or 7up are probably two well known examples of this, where the drink has carbon dioxide forced into it to make it fizzy. But you can get a similar, albeit less intense fizz, through brewing. It’ll involve some form of yeast or “ginger bug” which, over time, will introduce a fizz via fermentation. Depending on the yeast or fermentation process you use you might end up producing a small amount of alcohol but probably not enough to qualify it as an alcoholic drink
Edit: lols at being downvoted because “only my definition of lemonade is the correct definition of lemonade”.
Fermentation that produces fizz. Rather than carbonation added mechanically/ by carbonic acid. Or flat lemonade with no bubbles, which is basically sugar water and lemon juice.
Bundaberg is an Australian company who makes brewed lemonade, and their website advertises a 3 day brewing process.
Essentially they take lemon juice and add cane sugar, to make it sweeter, and then they add yeast (most likely saccharomyces cerevisiae, aka brewer’s yeast.)
The brewer’s yeast will eat sugar and poop out alcohol and carbon dioxide. Bundaberg allows this to happen for three days, and then they heat the liquid to a hot enough temperature to kill the yeast, stopping the fermentation when the alcohol content is still under 0.5% (so that it can legally be sold as a non-alcoholic beverage.) The purpose of the brewing process is to create more complex flavours than just lemons and sugar – the small amount of alcohol created in the brewing process makes the lemonade taste tangy.
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