Forck It

I’ve been in search of the perfect lemonade for a year and a half, attempting to recreate a lemonade from a cafe I used to frequent. Their lemonade was perfectly sweet and tart with floral vanilla notes. I’ve made and tasted many lemonades over the past 18 months in search of a similar lemonade and none have compared.

My most recent trial was Meyer lemonade. I was handed a bag of Meyer lemons leftover from my work at the end of the week. I seized the opportunity to make a batch of lemonade, hoping that the inherent sweet and floral notes of Meyer lemons would be what I’ve been craving. I had a jar of crystalized honey that I decided to use to sweeten the lemonade and to boost up the floral note. The result was delicious but had a consequence that I hadn’t anticipated.

When I make lemonade I squeeze a bunch of lemons an sweeten them but don’t add water. That allows me to store it in the fridge without taking up a huge amount of space, that way whenever I want a glass of lemonade I just add some lemonade “concentrate” to a glass and top it off with water. The problem occurred after the lemonade had been in the refrigerator for a couple days. Opening the concentrate and smelling it presented an odd fermented scent. Thinking that it might have been from the older lemons I had used I decided that it was just the lemon juice fermenting, perhaps being inoculated by yeasts before I had made the juice. With further thought I decided to research the effect of adding water to honey; I discovered that honey is full of enzymes and naturally occurring yeasts that activate and multiply when in contact with water forming a fermented honey* substance! Delicious. 

Needless to say I haven’t yet been able to recreate the lemonade from that cafe, though I do recommend trying Meyer lemonade and using honey as a lemonade sweetener if you’re going to be drinking it quickly.
 

*Fermented honey is sold as a health food and is available online. It’s said to be a great aid for your digestion, even more so than regular raw honey. It’s richer in flavor and slightly foamy.