Hard stop in excerpt length of Feature content in CleanJournalPro

I am trying to limit the amount of text in my feature content excerpt of CleanJournalPro. Then in the page it links to, I have a pdf of a story. But the excerpt always grabs the words of the pdf headline and puts it out front on the featured content page, which looks dumb. How can I put a hard stop to end that excerpt where I want it to end? I've tried the html break but that didn't work.