I've gotten around to bottling the Hard Strawberry Breeze. Does this drink have a celebrity name yet? If not, we should name the chilled version a "Lucille Ball". It's a little bit red, can smack you around, and convinces you to do silly things. Sound right? "I think I'll have a Hard Lucille Ball with my key-lime pie please." Way better than drinking a Hard Arnold Palmer.
I wasn't sure how much priming sugar to add, and I don't exactly have a scale to measure the priming sugar by weight. However, most recipes I read recommend 3/4 cup of priming sugar for 5 gallons. I'm using a 1 gallon batch, so I ended up boiling 1/5 of 3/4 of a cup (3/20 of a cup) of priming sugar. Which turns out to be almost 2.5 Tablespoons. Does that sound right? The carbonation calculators I tried all measured in weight. (sad, sad, face)
I guess I'll know in a couple of weeks whether 2.5 Tablespoons is enough to carbonate these Lucies.
By the way, you might be interested in knowing how I back sweetened, since the fermented mixture is terrible. I actually boiled and added 3 cups of granulated baking Splenda. The big fluffy kind that resembles snow flakes. At one cup it definitely wasn't sweet enough, and at 3 cups, the girlfriend finally gave me the nod of approval. Due to all the excess mass from the extra sugar and water, I almost ended up with a full 12 pack (one bottle short). As another side note about the back sweetening, Splenda definitely has a lower gravity than sugar. The recipe fermented down to almost 1.000 even. 3 cups of splenda only added 0.010 to the scale. Granted, I added about a cup of water to each cup of sugar for boiling, so maybe that helped the gravity even out too.
I'll let you know how this tasty stuff turns out in a week or two.
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