19th Century Apple Brandy at Historic Locust Grove

today we are at historic Locust Grove in Louisville Kentucky we'll be doing a special this is a very special on-site episode today I've got with me Brian Cushing he's a program director here at this site and our guest - distiller is Allen Bishop and he'll be directing the episode today and what are we gonna be making so we're gonna be making historic Applejack style brandy is what we're gonna be making today apple brandy so step number one how do we get started got a mash some apples so we're gonna get started mashing some apples [Applause] [Music] so tell me about the mashing process versus grinding and why we're doing it with a stick etc yes sir so most of the early distilleries especially the farm distilleries or even a smaller industrial style distilleries they would have relied on as much of the primitive technologies of what they could because they didn't have a lot of money to buy specialty tools but be on top of that the distilling portion of what they did was secondary it was ancillary to the farm work so they're gonna get away with putting as little into it as what they possibly could so on the on the bottom end of the farm is still arees you have this basic methodology using a stick to break up apples but then you can have anything up to a small Apple grinder or the people that had a little more money might even have like a nut miller or something of that nature with which they could grind their apples with you might be familiar with modern apple brandy made from apple juice obviously tying into apple cider and you can make brandy that way the style of brandy that we're gonna be making today is actually what they call apple mash brandy and the reason for the mashing over the cider is that you have a limited amount of time to work with when you're creating your brandy and it takes one to three bushels of apples to make one gallon of brandy so obviously much easier much more efficient as far as the farm workers go to grind those apples up and so the real difference here is whether or not we squeeze those apples out or actually throw the apples and everything into the stone yes sir okay so this Applejack style is like hey we're gonna get this fermenting we're gonna let them all this stuff stay we're not gonna strain it out we're at toss it all in the pot right that so that's the real difference yep and the big thing about that is to that in that time period so the apple mash cider the Applejack that was made was actually considered a higher quality than general apple brandy because you're actually in contact in the fermentation vessel with all the skin all the things that make an apple an apple all the solids and everything you're extracting even more the flavor of that Apple okay so brandy distillation is really about the concentration of the air mass okay so right the more of that that you can hold on to the more aroma you get the more flavor you set but won't they get so with this apple mash brandy it puts all those elements of the Apple in contact with the yeast which is going to convert sugar and ethanol and subsequently you're get more of the flavor of the Apple from this type of mashing that you would from a juice so the more mashing though we get the finer those particles are the more it can work on it the more flavors we extract that's why we might want a real fine grind as much as possible yes exactly so Alan these apples are all chopped up they're nice and fine what's our next step so our next step is we're gonna come over here to our boiler this is a 60 gallon copper boiler and what we're gonna do is we're gonna boil some water and we're gonna use so we got this boiling yep yep we're gonna use that water then to cook the apples in essentially so so how are we gonna do that so we're gonna pour the the water directly over top the apples and that's gonna begin that cooking process breaking down those cell walls releasing all those sugars and breaking down whatever starches may be left in that Apple from storage and at the same time it's going to kill off any microorganisms that might otherwise interfere with our fermentation process of course in the early days those guys didn't know a whole lot about that they just knew the best way to do it was this way yeah they didn't they didn't know how or why things work they knew how they worked so I just like our copper boiler the reason that they used the copper was because it was reactive so they knew that it would heat up faster than anything else that they had the other thing it does is it captures a different types of sulfur compounds and it cleans up the water it subsequently cleans up the fermentation and the same reason that stills were made out of copper as well so they would have noticed those reactions over time but maybe not knowing why [Music] so we are attempting to drop our temperature down to about 90 degrees so that's where yeast likes to be happy yeah and again back in those days most the farmer distillers wouldn't have had a thermometer to check with so it all would have been done by hand so we are at about 90 degrees now and we're gonna pitch our yeast and begin the process of converting all those sugars how are you gonna know what temperature that is well the yeast themselves you know they talk amongst one another right and they have an idea there's a little warm taking bath well I mean how we how are we gonna find out what type of power we can carry in that time period essentially you're just gonna check it and make sure that it's nice and lukewarm you don't want it overly warm pretty close to obviously your own body temperature yeah 90 we want this a little less than blood warm yes okay yeah so once we pitch the yeast that's gonna kick off the process of fermentation we're gonna start converting all that sugar into ethanol and then also co2 and a couple days you're gonna start seeing bubbles form and a cap form once the fermentation is done two things you're gonna notice is you'll be able to taste it and you won't taste any of that sweetness anymore okay and the other thing is when you pull your finger back out you pull it out now you can tell it's sticky there sugar there right when it's finished that sugar is not gonna be there so the heat doesn't taste sweet because it's all I've sugared all been fermented yes so the yeast that we're actually going to use is very particular to this to this style of brandy so this is actually a yeast that comes from a distillery in southern Indiana called the McCoy distillery and that distillery made specifically Applejack brandy that's all they made Applejack and peach brandy tell me how you got this so we harvested this yeast that distillery is the only distillery I know of in southern Indiana from those farm distillers that actually still has a building remaining original wood and everything so we basically we made the equivalent of our mash here and we set that around various locations in that old distillery after 24 hours we notice that we had yeast working all for those samples per minute around the same time they all smelled the same and they all tasted the same so we presume that they were all for the same or very similar yeast that was dedicated to the production of alcohol right so that yeast can live in that wood for hundreds of years and pretty proud pretty happy to have this particular yeast to put back into work in the style of brandy production so that's what you've got you're gonna add to this yes sir yeah so let's pitch it alright so and that's as simple as it sounds we're just going to our jug up and and pour in so should also mention it depending on how involved those early distillers war they may or may not have culture their own yeasts we know the McCoys did because they had their own yeast yuck and the East jug was basically a way of propagating your yeast and maintaining it and keeping it and generally they would keep to around they would have one that traveled back and forth to and from the distillery from work with the distiller and a second one that they would usually put somewhere like in a well where it was closed up so would stay cold nowhere would get to it and I'd have it as a backup in case they ever lost their original strain so what's gonna happen now is this is going to work off in six to seven days essentially converting all that sugar to alcohol after that six to seven day period and we get this down to where there's no sugars left we're gonna take it and we're actually going to bucket-brigade that into the still so this goes in the mash the apple bits everything everything great into this yes sir yep in the early days when they didn't have a mechanized education and the still you'd actually bucket into the still and you'd have somebody stirring inside the still and tall got up to boiling the other thing they often did is they would line the bottom of the still with straw and what that does is it puts a layer in and keeps this from burning to the bottom of the still so we would go into the still and do that double pot still distillation process so when we're talking about that what we're doing is essentially the first run on the still we're bringing the temperature up to one hundred and seventy two point three degrees alcohol vapor rises comes up to the cap and across the line arm and over here out the worm we're not doing anything to it to change it whatsoever just capturing all the alcohol we came at about fifty to sixty proof roughly mmm we're gonna capture all that and go back into the still but that back end is still one hundred seventy two point three degrees and we're gonna make our cuts so the first thing it's going to come off there's gonna be four shots almost all methanol second piece is going to be heads so it's gonna be like acetyl aldehyde ethyl acetate smells a little like fingernail polish remover will hold on to that and that might get rerun into another batch later on because it doesn't accumulate over time and then we're gonna have our hearts which is going to be what we actually want to drink sell or trade and then about 90 proof to about twenty we're gonna have our tells where you have more water than you do ethanol they begin to get a little bit vegetative in flavor still good alcohol we're gonna save that and that'll go into the next batch that we distill again to rectified even more [Music] Brian Cushing has come all the way up from Locust Grove in Louisville Kentucky with the finished product so we can try it out and see the the stages we've got thanks for coming up Brian thanks for having me it's great so what have we got here you got a bunch of different bottles yes so since we can't actually distill on-site we did we went through the whole mashing process correctly in the video and all that so it was ready to go but since we're not a licensed or ourselves we can't we can't finish it out so our of our sponsors a Kentucky artisan distillery in Crestwood Kentucky was kind enough to take the mash up to their facility and finish it out it's kind of a research project for us so they did the fermentation they did the distillation and even though they were using some modern equipment they kept it as period as they possibly could saying the same as as what would have been done in the time right so you've got multiple things here these are the stages right so these this is all the different these are the different cuts we've got a few different cuts here we've got two of heads mm-hmm and this is the toxic stuff so that's the rough you don't want to drink and like Alan said in the video I think depending on how good the distillery was in the early 19th century they might have cut this out or not so this is not the stuff you want to consume this these are the hearts this is the good stuff and these are the tails this stuff isn't gonna hurt you but it's also not it doesn't taste a great year so just feel the distiller they might leave some of this in for some character but not too much more score and and maybe mix mix some of these in either to you know fill up the you know fill up the barrel or cut it out if it's the goods so that this ideally and then this might be redistill later in a different batch but but hopefully if you do your job right it's not going into the final into what you're actually going to drink that's a headache waiting to happen right okay here's the finished product let's try this out it's got a it does have a nice fruity aromatic to it right off the bat so let's find out what it takes you know I you know I was expecting just a white liquor just food just alcohol but there's a lot more here absolutely that was surprised that really was we try it there are a lot of different flavors there and I I wasn't gonna guess that I was gonna get any Apple out of this really but there is a Apple aroma and some apple flavor there that's left in it very very mellow for something that it's not aged it's right you know Wow well this was I mean Alan's skill in the mashing the orchard that helped us out with the apples Kentucky artists and distilleries they're there their skills doing the distillation and we all kind of got together and talked about it to kind of wrap up the research on this couple of factors we figure played into that were the solids being left and while they distilled it looks like it would've been 200 years ago and then the wine SAP apples especially that the torture to manage to get in there for us and they think the guys are great selection of apples for this is tremendous hmm Brian thank you so much for bringing these up and inviting us to you know participate in that whole brandy making process if we were there to match the apples and all that stuff so it was a lot of fun if you are anywhere close to that Louisville Kentucky area make sure to check out historic Locust Grove such a great program that you got there and a lot of things going on we'll make sure to put a link down in the description section and I want to thank you guys for coming along this we savor the flavors in the aromas of the 18th century

Channel: Townsends

Views: 230,717

Keywords: townsends, jas townsend and son, reenacting, history, 18th century, 19th century, jon townsend, 18th century cooking, locust grove, kentucky history, george rogers clark, colonial cooking, food storage, cooking (interest), campfire cooking, historic locust grove, historic site, brandy, apple brandy, apple mash brandy, distillery

Id: tlwF34TkT3o

Length: 13min 1sec (781 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 18 2019