Moes Mango Melonade

Women like chick beers.  (Alcopops, as the Utah Legislature calls them, what a silly name.)  In particular, my girlfriend enjoys Mikes Hard Mango Punch.  Unfortunately, since "Alcopops" have been outlawed in Utah's grocery stores, you have to get them from the liquor store.  Oh, but wait, no liquor store in Utah (that I've found) sells them yet!  We end up having to go allllll the way to another state to pick some up.  That other state doesn't sell them cheap either.  I'm sure nearby state's "Alcopop" revenue (and prices) went up considerably after Utah's silly law passed.  At least, in the cities closest to Utah...

But anyway, that's a tangent for another day.

Today, I've designed a recipe to replace Mike's Hard Mango Punch, henceforth called MHMP.  I've learned some valuable lessons from cider experiments long past, so hopefully this one will turn out superb.

The hardest part (for me) is to not add a ton of sugar at the start.  MHMP is fairly low on the alcohol at 4%.  If I added pounds and pounds of sugar, I'd end up with mango wine.  The girlfriend likes to drink wines and beers about as much as she likes to drink gasoline.  And no, she doesn't drink gasoline.  I had to get some info about how efficient the yeast will turn sugar to alcohol (called "Attenuation" in the yeast world) and add just enough sugar to hit the desired alcohol percentage.  It turns out that Red Star's champagne yeast has an attenuation between 72% and 77%.  To meet in the middle, and make the math easier, I decided to guesstimate 75%.

So if I want to spike it just a little bit more than MHMP, and leave it at... oh, say 5.5%... I'd want my OG to be 1056 (or there-a-bouts).  I actually overshot the mark and ended up with 1059.  If it ferments down to 1015 or so, I should have 5.78%.  A little bit higher than I expected, and definitely higher than MHMP, but not too bad.

So on to the recipe:
14 (yes, 14) 12oz cans of Hawaii's Own Mango Orange frozen concentrate
  (I couldn't find plain mango juice or concentrate anywhere)
3 3/4 gallons of water
4 cups of corn sugar
Red Star champagne yeast
Potassium Metabisulfite 

Pretty basic stuff.  Squeezing 14 cans of frozen concentrate into a carboy isn't exactly my idea of fun, so I'm fermenting this all in my wine bucket.

The frozen mango concentrate.  It kind of looks like yams.

With any luck, we'll have some chick beer in a week or so!  After it ferments I plan to dump the potassium metabisulfite in to inhibit the yeast.  Then add sugar to sweeten it up to the juice's gravity before I originally added sugar and fermented the whole mix.  The gravity before I added 4 cups of corn sugar was roughly 1049 (so each cup added 2.5 points of gravity to the 5 gallon mixture)

I plan to rack it into a carboy for a few days just to clear it up and get it off the yeast cake.  That's also when I plan to add the potassium metabisulfite and sugar.  Then I plan to dump it straight into a keg and lightly carbonate it.  There's no hops, malts, so I can bottle to clear glass after carbonating, and also the aging process should be somewhat short.  We'll see.