How can I get a longer automatic excerpt in Jekyll?

Currently, I include excerpts like this: ``` {{ post.excerpt | strip_html }} ``` But this seems to give only the first paragraph. But I would like to get a fixed number of words. Or better: I would like to define a maximum number of characters and get so many words that - the number of characters is less than the maximum - one word more would be over the maximum number of characters Is there a way to do this with Jekyll (1.3.1)? edit: `<!-- more -->` is not an answer! I think excerpting should work automatically and my posts should only contain markup that is absolutely necessary.