I Turned 44 lb Of Peaches Into Brandy. You Can Too!

i don't have millions of peaches i've got a couple of hundred and they definitely weren't put into a can i guess i bet the man to it because i'm gonna put them into a bottle we're making peach brandy baby did you think i was not gonna make the reference how's it going chases i hope you're having a kick-ass week i'm jesse and this is still it and uh i am definitely having a kick-ass week because i've been wanting to make peach brandy for a long long long time now i just want to point out team that some of these peaches don't look so great they've got blemishes on the skin so on and so forth couldn't really care what they look like i keep what they taste like and what they smell like and these are really really nice i guess it's the right time of year in new zealand i don't know these things i just know that they're delicious and i want to make brandy out of them so let's take these boxes inside i'm going to be processing this stuff by hand so i want a nice cutting board and a nice knife and a nice surface let's get stuck in first up i made sure to give the peaches a really good wash just to make sure there was nothing sticking to the outside of them get rid of any spray that happened to be on there and of course remove any of the stems i went through each and every peach like this before dicing them up with a knife ah so that took about two hours of straight cutting um to get this sorted you're probably asking yourself why on earth am i doing this much and why on earth did i do it this way number one forgot that our food processor was out of action so that wasn't an option number two i kind of romanticised the idea of just doing it all by hand obviously there's other ways of doing this if you want to do that that's fine and number three you can you know there are a lot of pictures out there that will let you just break them open and pull the stone out when they're at the right ripeness these are not one of them it just it doesn't work with these they go from being hard to basically going rotten you know what's kind of crazy though is this is every single stone it's all of them whoops well minus one now but from the whole lot whereas i got uh four and a half of these buckets or pots worth of flesh the rest is already in the fermenter do you know what else is crazy though and this the supposed information age i can go online and get information on how to make peach brandy from the other side of the world when i look for that information the information isn't given to me really based on what i'm actually looking for it's made better for me by someone else or a robot based on information that robot has about me like my location for example today's sponsor has something to say about that nordvpn what does a vpn actually do in a nutshell that takes your data encrypts it and sends it through a network of their servers when the data finally reaches its intended destination it looks like it came from an ip address based in the country that you decide on 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fermenter i could top it up with water just enough to barely cover the peaches and next i added some pectic enzymes just to help thin things out and break it down a little and of course the trusty paint mixer mixed it up entirely it's the next morning and after the enzymes have had a bit of time to do their job and loosen things up a bit and a little bit more food processing with the old paint mixer the wash slop now looks like this so it is fairly thick still i used a filter just to get out enough clear liquid to get a reading with a hydrometer and we're currently sitting at uh 10 36 that is a little bit lower than i was hoping for possibly due to the fact that some of the peaches weren't entirely ripe enough oh quick pro tip guys what you can do if you're having this trouble where you know have enough peaches uh right now that are 100 right is what you do is you collect the ones that are right you process them and you freeze them and then you collect more that are right you process them and freeze them and then once you have enough processed and frozen you can pull them all out and make the mash i didn't do that obviously anyway it could have been because of that it could have been because i added a little bit too much water i was hoping for more like 10 40 10 45 but we're sitting at 10 30 what i say 10 30 6. when this ferments out it's probably gonna be about four percent four and a half percent just a little bit low so i'm going to do something underhanded dastardly unspeakable even i'm going to take the walk of shame over here and the walk of shame back i'm going to put some sugar in ah i really didn't want to do this but i wanted to keep it pure but it is what it is i'm going to bump the gravity up to 1065 with the sugar which will mean that i'm getting roughly half the fermentables from the peaches and half fermentables from sugar like i said i feel disgusting doing this but i'm i'm going to if you're in a similar situation and you're trying to figure out how to calculate something like this you can go to the chasercraft website and there is a sugar wash calculator here the cool thing is with sugar is that it's um it's kind of linear or additive so if you want to get to 1.07 and you have 1.035 then 0.35 plus 0.35 equals 0.7 you need to get 0.35 into the wash and that calculator will let you do that with volume and the amount of sugar you add pretty easy let's talk yeast shall we so i had a lots of options on yeast i could use for this obviously but i did get some recommendations from two people that i respect number one is a local guy called graham who to be honest helped me out with a whole lot of this and kind of gave me the uh the basic roadmap slash inspiration to just get in and get this damn thing done thank you dude uh he's just did this stuff and also bearded and bored suggested this stuff you don't know who better than borders sort your out check his videos out up here both of them recommended this yeast and i've been wanting to use it for some time people talk about it in a way where it it's almost got like this magical property to bring out the flavour of the fruit i don't know if i believe that i've never tried it so i can't say for sure but i think probably more what it does do is produce esters that augment the flavors of fruit and it is touted to create esters on the floral fruity side of things especially when you ferment at a slightly lower temperature so that's why i'm using lalamond k1v116 man mouthful anyway this has been hydrating for the last uh 35 minutes it's an easier way to wake the yeast up rather than dumping it straight on into the crazy environment full of sugar with a lot of pressure on the yeast cell walls so to be honest there's not a lot left to do other than where's my drill where's my drill ah give it another blitz with this to get as much oxygen into the work as we can pitch this in give it a gentle stir cap it up and wait this took a little bit longer to ferment out than most of my projects do it's almost three weeks to the day now but it has fermented out dry it's down to a gravity of one which is great the next step that we need to do is to separate the chunky stuff in here and the fermenter from the liquid assuming that you don't have the ability to distill you know on fruit or on grain there's a couple of different ways to do this and it doesn't have to be overly complicated for example you could literally use one of these guys it's going to take a few batches but you'd get there another pretty accessible option for home brewers home distillers these grain bags you can get them from almost any you know home brewing home distilling supply store if you are in america and you want to know where to get one i'll put a link to adventures in homebrewing down below great service i love your work guys uh but today seeing as i've got the equipment i'm gonna be using this which is um the brewing kettle from claw hammer supplies and it is literally just an oversized sieve [Music] in case you don't know the reason we're separating the chunky stuff from the liquid stuff is because in small stills that home distillers often have access to they tend to scorch which means anything chunky in the still will burn to the bottom of the pot just like when you're making a stew or a soup and uh it'll kind of ruin things but when products like these are made traditionally like rakia for example more often than not it's desirable to actually distill on the fruit on the chunky stuff there's flavor in there and you want it you know in your final product don't get me wrong team if you don't have the ability to distill on the chunky stuff this is still worth doing it's still very much worth doing but for those of you that are distilling with something similar to a t500 i got a little secret weapon that might help you out this is a pot cool eh ah but the pot has legs let me explain before you think i've gone completely crazy it's a really really simple concept we're happy with clear liquid in the t500 so we fill the t500 up about half full with a whole lot of relatively clear liquid this thing can then go inside the pot the whole thing goes inside the legs keep it up way above the bottom of the pot and we put the sloppy stuff inside the pot with legs in other words the t500 is kind of acting like its own jacketed still the clear liquid heats up it heats the whole chamber the soup the goopy stuff heats up and that can distill as well and it isn't going to burn just remember guys if you are going to build something like this make sure you're using legit materials i would stick to 100 stainless for everything don't use zinc don't use galvanized you guys know the drill so with the filtered liquid and optionally the chunky stuff in there as well if you're doing that it is time to move on to our stripping runs and the stripping runs serve one main purpose if you're not sure what they are and that is basically just to cut the volume down so what we're going to do is a series of stripping runs wash comes out of the fermenter goes into the still we run it pretty hard and fast and all we're doing is cutting down on volume and then we collect everything that comes off the still that two or three times we run it we put it back into the still and that will be the spirit run that we're gonna do later on yes this is a t500 still and yes it is normally set up and used uh as a full reflux still to create really high abv basically vodka but in this situation what we've done is we've disconnected the reflux condenser and we're only using the product condenser if that makes no sense to you whatsoever that's cool don't stress about it there's a video up here you can check out that'll uh sort you out and let you know exactly what i'm talking about basically the long and short of it is that we've taken this reflux still and we've turned it into a pot still anyway i figure i've got a solid few hours of stripping runs ahead of me so let me get these out of the way and i'll check back in with you before the spirit [Music] [Music] it ended up taking three stripping runs to get through all of that peach wash uh took some time so now it's the next day but what i have now is approximately 10 liters i haven't exactly measured it of low wines once again low wines are all the stuff that's collected from the stripping runs at 40 abv pretty much exactly so that can go on into the pot now and we can get started on the spirit run which is exciting back at the still things are all heated up and we have action we're running now for those of you that are new to this this first initial part that comes off the still we don't want to keep it it's nasty you don't want to drink it it's not enjoyable it's not going to be enjoyable today while you drink it and it's definitely not going to be enjoyable tomorrow when you wake up so the idea here is that we're going to take what we call the four shots and basically just discard them you don't have to discard them use them for window cleaner or fire later or whatever you want but we're getting them out of the way so i'm getting to 100 mils now that's what i'm going to take for this batch but now that we've collected the four shots uh i'm actually going to switch over to collecting what we call heads now the heads we're once again we're not gonna drink right now but the thing is i'm gonna collect into multiple little jars like this so when i've got some time and i can stand over at the bench later on i can assess the cuts and decide exactly where i'm going to make these you know cuts between heads and hearts and hearts and tails by the way i'm running the still exactly the same as we did for the stripping run with one exception so there is still no water going to the reflux condenser the water is only going to the product condenser we're running it pretty much as a pot still the only difference is now i'm running the power through my voltage regulator so what i'm doing is essentially limiting the t500 to having roughly half of the power it normally has going into the pot and i'm just doing that to limit the vapor speed limit the speed of distillation create a slightly more delicate end and refined product during the course of the run as the percentage alcohol that's left in the pot drops yes i am going to have to bump that temperature up a little bit to keep the same speed of off-take over at the cutscene here we are on the bench guys i'll be honest with you i've done most of donkey work so you don't have to sit through at all but as a summary uh heads up top they heads i mean nasty stuff you don't really want it the thing that was interesting to me is that i was expecting to be fighting between how much heads do i keep versus how much peach flavor do i keep in here and right at the turn which is sort of these three glasses here from heads into hearts honestly there's not a whole lot of peach flavor sitting here going through the actual hearts themselves kind of made me i don't know why i haven't learned this already it happens to be so often but i've learned that when i think of peach what i think of the flavour i think of is this kind of thing peach extract and it is that one-dimensional juicy peach flesh flavor and there's not a lot to it but when you actually eat a peach that's not the case you get that weird fluffy peach skin thing you get the kind of the bitterness and the astringency from the skin but also this crazy like flavor boost that's in the skin as well all of these things get crammed in together to give you the experience of eating a peach and it is so much more than just peach extract and the funny thing is i've kind of got a spectrum of it running through here it's really quite interesting to be perfectly honest with you anyway when i got down to tails oh sorry you might be wondering too why this jar is um empty was it because i tasted something nasty i just knocked the jar over like an ass anyway down here in the tails um honestly these sort of snuck up and surprised me i didn't really taste much of anything when i was running the still until i started noticing something a little bit odd happening in this jar and then suddenly the next jar was cloudy anyway so i've got two blends one is literally a little bit of everything from here through to here i just went big with it uh that was the first thing i did just to see what happened a little tincture once again it's in that video smells great smells like fresh peach which is amazing i didn't think this would smell like peach the problem is on the tongue it's just not quite right there's something weird about it it is almost like um barrel spice from a whiskey and that doesn't sit right with me it doesn't sit right at all uh and when i first tasted that i'll be honest i freaked out a little bit until i thought about it a little bit further and i realized that it's not actually spice it's tannin and astringency i realized that i went back and did a another blend and dropped both of these glasses out and went just from here through to here it leans slightly more towards that sort of more typical juicy peach flavor which is fine and on the tongue it takes you through the whole sort of spectrum of peach but it doesn't quite get to that crazy grungy like barrel pepper whiskey sort of side of things so i'm happy which means i'm gonna blend all these things into here and then we can get an exact abv proof it down but there's one last thing i want to try uh before i call this quits and that is weather a very very very small amount of this is going to make it better or ruin it i guess we'll find out come on no i don't enjoy it i'm going to leave it as is so that is 76 and we have just finished measuring this out 2.6 liters which means i need to proof it down with hold on come on phone uh 1.73 liters of water to get 45 percent it is quite like heavy and grungy and i think maybe using like one plate maybe two plates on the spirit run would have been good but i didn't want to do that i wanted to keep it with the t500 as well that's something else you could experiment with uh if you have the equipment and anyway team i hope you enjoyed the video if you did you know do the youtube things like subscribe so on and so forth and i'll catch you next time keep on chasing the craft see ya

Channel: Still It

Views: 709,434

Keywords: nord VPN, distilling, peach, peaches, peach brandy, peach rakia, still it, jesse, chase the craft, CTC

Id: KyF3wFAehCs

Length: 19min 41sec (1181 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 30 2021