Homemade Fresh Guava Lemonade Recipe

Our homemade guava lemonade made with fresh fruit is the best lemonade if you love natural tropical flavors! This has a few steps, but the results are absolutely worth the effort to make this lemonade recipe. Our recipe is perfectly sweet, tart, and mellow with no bitterness.

This guava lemonade is so good, I’ve made several batches of this and my family can’t get enough of it!

Our homemade lemonade has a fresh tropical taste and aroma from in-season guava and it is mellow with the perfect balance of sweet and tart. One of our additional steps in this recipe makes this lemonade even more mellow with no bitterness.

Even though it’s not even officially spring yet, we’ve been drinking quite a bit of this lemonade, I can’t keep it in the fridge it’s that good. We’ll show you how to make a crazy good tropical lemonade that’s perfect for spring and summer!

Our guava lemonade is:

• Top 14 allergen free!

How to make fresh guava lemonade

Our homemade lemonade recipe has several steps in it, but I guarantee the extra steps are well worth the effort for amazing results!

Here are the steps for making our guava lemonade (the full recipe card is at the bottom of the post, this is just an overview of steps):

1. Juice your lemons and strain the seeds out of the juice. You’ll need 1-1/4 cup of fresh lemon juice for this recipe, so we juiced about 5-7 medium lemons, and strained the juice into a measuring glass.
2. Slice 1/2 to 1 whole lemon into slices.
3. Put the lemon juice, lemon slices, sugar, and water in a small saucepan and cook over medium-low heat for 12-15 minutes. Don’t skip adding the lemon slices in this step, it adds extra flavor.
4. While the lemon juice is cooking, quarter your guava fruits and puree them with cold water (we used our NutriBullet). Strain out the seeds and set aside the liquid.
5. Once the lemon mixture has finished cooking, whisk in the guava puree.
6. Pour the guava lemon concentrate over a pitcher filled with 1 quart of ice (I recommend using a pitcher with measurements).
7. Stir well, the ice will melt and dilute the lemon concentrate as it cools it down.
8. Add enough cold water to the pitcher to make 2 full quarts of lemonade.
9. Serve immediately or store in the fridge until it’s completely chilled (the ice in this cools it off enough, but this will be fine in the fridge for a few days, if it lasts that long!).

Don’t skip cooking the lemon slices in the lemon/sugar mixture! The rind will not make this lemonade bitter, but it adds wonderful flavor to this lemonade. We explain a bit more about this below.

We used white guava in this recipe since that’s all we had access to, but you can use pink guava in our recipe if you want. Using pink guava would add a beautiful pink color to this lemonade!

Why cook the lemon slices with the lemon juice?

One of the things that makes this lemonade really delicious (aside from the guava) is cooking the sliced lemons with the lemon juice and sugar. Don’t skip this step if you want the best tasting lemonade!

Some people might think that cooking some of the lemon rind with the lemon juice and sugar would make the lemonade bitter, but it actually as the opposite effect. The natural lemon oils in the lemon rind actually help to mellow out the lemonade and remove bitterness in the lemonade or any harsh, overly tart notes.

I can’t take credit for coming up with this technique of incorporating natural lemon oil from the lemon peels into the lemonade. My mom had learned a similar method several years ago and I couldn’t remember where she heard that idea, but I remember that her lemonade had an amazing taste.

I found out after I made this recipe that my mom had learned of a similar method for lemonade from one of her Mary Jane’s Farm magazines (started in 1996) that called for pouring boiling water over the leftover lemon rinds after they had been juiced and letting them sit for 30 minutes in the hot water, then removing the rinds and mixing the remaining water with the sugar and lemon juice.

Our method works similarly and gets all that good flavor from the lemon peels, but this is a bit faster, and has the same incredible taste I remember.

I will add a note here that I don’t think adding lemon essential oil to lemonade is going to have the same effect as cooking your own lemon slices. Essential oils are super concentrated oils and really shouldn’t be ingested, so I don’t recommend skipping this step of the recipe and just adding lemon essential oils to your lemonade.

How to reduce the sugar in this lemonade

This lemonade has the perfect sweet and tart balance to us, but if you want your lemonade a little less sweet, you can reduce the sugar a bit to suit your personal preferences. Start with reducing the sugar by 1/4 cup and try out your lemonade with that adjustment first before reducing it any more.

You can try substituting the sugar in this recipe for an sugar substitute (like erythritol), however since we haven’t tested this I am not sure what the ratio would be or how it would taste.

You can also sub half the sugar for another sweetener of your choice (like Swerve or Allulose syrup), just make sure that even if you use a syrup like allulose, you don’t skip the step where you cook the lemon slices in the lemon juice or you’ll miss out on the added flavor from the natural lemon oils from the lemon peel.

We used unbleached cane sugar in our recipe (the Zulka morena cane sugar) since it’s more natural than plain white sugar and doesn’t use bleaching agents. It also has a nice flavor in recipes. We use the Zulka sugar in just about everything we make (unless it’s a candy recipe).