Limos & Co

Lemonade - perhaps the best refreshment in the world

When you think of lemonade, you often think of the homemade drink in your own kitchen, where you add lemon and sugar to water and stir vigorously until the sugar is dissolved. Or when you think of lemonade, you think of the little stalls where children sell their homemade lemonade to supplement their pocket money. This lemonade is, of course, the most classic form of lemonade.

However, for the last ten to twenty years, the number of lemonades on the drinks shelves that we are allowed to enjoy has been increasing. How fortunate! In fact, it wasn't so long ago that our shelves were only filled with Coke, Fanta, Sprite and apple spritzer - apart from hundreds of different juices. However, our thirst for variety and non-alcoholic diversity has given rise to many new sodas and organic lemonades. This development is still so new that there is hardly an online lemonade store yet. We have changed that with our marketplace. With us, you can buy lemonades online that you would otherwise hardly find in a store or store.

Lemonade has long since become something for adults too. Sometimes water is not enough to quench your thirst or it simply doesn't satisfy you enough. Then you need a drink with a sweet, fruity taste and sparkling carbonation. This combination makes drinking even more exciting. Just think of sparkling wine and champagne (the "adult beverage" par excellence). Exactly the same game: fruity, sweet, sparkling.

But sodas are an adult beverage anyway when you think of long drinks. After all, lemonade is used in many long drinks - or as a filler in cocktails. The best-known lemonade for alcoholic drinks in recent years is without doubt tonic water. Tonic is one of the bitter lemonades. Just like bitter lemon, bitter grapefruit or bitter orange. Tonic water is indispensable for our beloved gin.

Apart from their own bitter taste due to the fruit used, bitter substances such as quinine are added to most bitter lemonades. Tonic water has by far the highest proportion of quinine. Bitter lemon and bitter orange usually only contain around a third of the quinine content of tonic water. Incidentally, this is measured in milligrams per liter.

The best-known and most popular long drinks include gin and tonic, Cuba Libre and vodka lemon. Although tonic, cola and bitter lemon all taste very different, their flavor is based on the same structure.

What is lemonade?

Lemonade is a non-alcoholic drink made from water, sugar and fruit juice. Originally, lemonade probably only consisted of water and lemon juice, i.e. even without sugar. Nowadays, sugar is an integral part of every lemonade and therefore also the definition of a soda. In fact, it is precisely this combination that makes lemonade so tasty: the acidity of the lemon juice and the sweetness of the sugar together make a delicious, refreshing drink.

Originally, lemonades were actually all lemon sodas (just think how old Sprite is). Nowadays, the fruit juice of various citrus fruits is used to get the typical acidity. In addition to lemon, this can be lime, orange, grapefruit, blood orange or even rhubarb. You can even use fruit vinegar, as vinegar has a very high acid content. With homemade lemonade, you can let your imagination run wild and try things out.

Lemonade has only become popular in the last 100 years or so, when we have had more and more access to tropical fruits such as lemons and other citrus fruits. As we know it from the movies, lemonade is a popular drink, especially in the USA, to refresh yourself in the hot summer.

Nowadays, lemonade includes just about any non-alcoholic drink. Even if the lemonade is red, purple, green or transparent. In the supermarket, you no longer really think of lemon with water and sugar when you hear the word "lemonade". But that's good and right. As we don't always feel like saying "soft drink", we have probably all tacitly agreed to call non-alcoholic sweet drinks with a fruity component lemonade.

This definition of lemonade also includes the fact that we always drink lemonade cold and that in most cases it contains carbon dioxide. It is precisely these factors that make lemonade a refreshing taste experience: sweet, fruity, cold and fizzy.

Nowadays, however, we have stretched lemonade so far that we also refer to herbal lemonades as sodas. These herbal lemonades may not even have citrus in their recipe, but they still pass for lemonade. Some people are even surprised that cola itself is also a lemonade. Sugar-free lemonades are also becoming more and more popular. Sugar actually "belongs" in a soft drink, but of course there is a trend towards sugar-free drinks. The fact that there are more and more alternatives is of course good news for anyone who wants to eat and drink less sugar.

Buy lemonade online

In our online lemonade store, almost all non-alcoholic drinks fall under lemonade. You can choose from our large selection and buy lemonade online easily and conveniently.

We are constantly working to expand our range. We are particularly proud to be able to offer the largest range of rare and special lemonades from regional producers. You can buy many different varieties in our lemonade store: Fruit lemonade, herbal lemonade, cola, iced tea, tonic water, lemonades with a high juice content and draught soda. But also fermented birch sap, for example with rhubarb and chokeberry, or syrup to make delicious lemonades yourself.

If you want to order lemonade online from us, you can always be sure that these are hard-to-find drinks.

Homemade lemonade

To be completely honest, you don't necessarily have to buy lemonade. You can also make incredibly tasty lemonade yourself. Making your own lemonade is really easy. It's much harder to brew your own craft beer, make a delicious liqueur or roast good coffee at home on your own.

With a few tricks and basic rules, you can make your own perfect lemonade at home. All you need for homemade lemonade is sparkling water, sugar syrup or sugar and fresh fruit.

Ingredients for your own lemonade:

1. water: the easiest thing to do is to buy mineral water. Preferably the most sparkling water you know. Alternatively, you can of course make your own sparkling water if you have a suitable device at home.

Why carbonated mineral water: Carbon dioxide causes a pleasant tingling sensation on our tongue, which we in turn perceive as refreshing and sparkling.

2. sugar or sugar syrup: For sweetness, you can make it particularly easy for yourself by simply buying sugar syrup from the store. However, if you want more of your own homemade lemonade, sugar syrup is extremely easy to make yourself. To do this, simply boil sugar in a pan with water. Preferably in a ratio of 1 to 1, then the result won't be too sweet.

Why sugar in lemonade: Like many animals, we love the taste of "sweet". And not just since the advent of industrially processed sweets. We humans have always loved sweet - back then as fructose in the form of sweet fruit. Our lemonade should not only have a sweet touch (depending on the taste), the sweetness also forms the perfect counterbalance to the acidity of the citrus fruit and results in a balanced, sparkling lemonade.

3. citrus fruit: Citrus fruit juice is best for acidity. These can be lemons and limes, but also oranges, grapefruit or mandarins. The fruits can of course also be mixed together.

Very important and not to be forgotten: The citrus fruit is only the basis for our homemade lemonade. It does not replace all the other fruits or ingredients that we can add. For example, melon juice, ginger, mint, cucumber, vanilla, peach, elderberry, lavender, basil, raspberries or passion fruit.

If you have these three ingredients, your homemade lemonade can't really go wrong. If you want to be really good, always have ice cubes ready for your own lemonade. After all, lemonade has to be cold - and the colder it is, the more refreshing it is.

Steps for making your own lemonade:

1. boil sugar syrup: (If you are using ready-made sugar syrup or have already made the sugar syrup, you can skip this point). Boil the water and add the sugar. The best ratio is always 1:1. Stir the water-sugar mixture constantly and allow it to boil gently. The syrup is ready when the liquid looks completely clear.

2. extract the fruit juice: You then need to juice the fresh fruit. It is best to use a juicer or a citrus press for this. Pretty much any juicer you have at home will usually do. Citrus juicers, which are increasingly being used for mixing cocktails, are of course also excellent.

3. mix the juice and syrup: The third step is to mix the sugar syrup with the fruit juice. The ratio of sweetness to acidity depends entirely on the lemonade and your own taste. You can use the following rule of thumb:

The sugar syrup should make up at least 10% and a maximum of 30%. (This refers to home-made sugar syrup in a 1:1 ratio).

10% (e.g. 100 ml for 1 liter total) is relatively low, but is completely sufficient if you are making an orange or tangerine soda, for example, which are already quite sweet on their own. 30% is again quite a lot, but is enough if you are making a lemonade, for example, which contains 30-35% lemon juice alone. Here, of course, you need more sweetness than with other lemonades.

4 Pour in sparkling water: The final step is to pour sparkling water over the syrup and juice mixture. Each lemonade should consist of at least one third mineral water. Depending on your taste and recipe, you can also serve half of your lemonade with water and half with the syrup and juice mixture.

To serve the lemonade, it is best to put ice cubes in a glass first, then pour the juice and syrup over it and top up with sparkling water at the end.

Recipes for homemade lemonade:

As corny as it may sound, there are no limits to the recipe ideas for homemade lemonade. If you stick to the three basic ingredients mentioned above for every lemonade, you can always add new fruits, herbs and other flavorings as you wish.

In addition to a simple version such as lemon, orange, passion fruit, rhubarb, mandarin or grapefruit lemonade, you can always mix up to two ingredients together. The important thing is that you are curious to try out this flavor combination yourself. Remember that lemon or lime juice should always be the base and not one of the two additional ingredients.

Other recipes you can try include: orange with dill, ginger with vanilla, watermelon with cucumber, cucumber and ginger, lemon and mint, lemon with rose, lemon and basil, watermelon with mint, mango with elderberry, peach with apple, raspberry with basil or elderberry with mint.