Trimming Excerpt on Front End

I am displaying podcast episodes as blog posts on my website front end and home page, etc. On archive pages, I am seeing the episode summary show up with similar behavior as custom excerpts. The problem is that custom excerpts are not trimmed at all. So the episode excerpts show way too much text. See screenshot: Screenshot by Lightshot.

If you look at this forum topic (Topic: Trimming Manual Excerpt - GenerateSupport), there is code my theme has developed to trim custom excerpts, and add a “read more” link. However this code is not working with podlove episode excerpts.

I am looking for a way to trim these excerpts if anyone can help. Thanks.