Making Real Apple Brandy At Home

how do you like them no need to be angry about it but i do quite like them just as they are but what happens if we ferment them and distill them how's it going chasers i hope you're having a kick-ass week i'm jesse this is still it and this is an apple i don't think that needs any introduction a little while ago however i took apple juice from the supermarket and turned it into kind of like an apple port or a fortified apple wine i guess you'd call it but today i thought we'd just take these straight fresh like a real actual apple and see just how much work it is to turn these things into an apple brandy and i don't know about you but i definitely want to know is the fresh stuff better than just apple juice obviously the first thing we need to talk about is apples now i am not an apple expert i don't know the varieties ah the varieties we have here i'm sure are very different from what you have in a different part of the world what i will say is that i'm using a mix of sweeter apples trying to get a little bit more uh sugar in the mix for yield a higher original gravity more spirit at the end but i'm also using some more tart a little bit more bite more appley appleness i guess you'd call it and apple to me is all about flavor not about just being sweet texture and flavor texture i'm not worried about flavor we want that so i got 20 kilos of apples from the local fruit store that's this in freedom units these will be popping up throughout the video and uh just so happened that some of those apples were they were seconds i got them cheap and they were they needed to be used quickly but some of them could do with a little bit more uh ripening off the tree so i decided to freeze 16 kilos of apples i cut them up took the nasty parts off decided actually to to get rid of the stems and the seeds and the cores for this video and bag them up and froze them thinking about yield here and actually utilizing the sugar in the apples letting them ripen a little bit longer anyway once those apples were ready the frozen ones came out of the freezer and got crushed up and juiced with a new little machine i've got actually to be more accurate it's a a pair of new machines two new machines neither of which are particularly complicated or complex by themselves but together they do a pretty awesome job the first one is this guy here i bought from trademe in new zealand and it is sold the listing that i bought it anyway was sold as a grape crusher but exactly the same thing is sold in a bunch of different places under different names often under things like cider apple crusher fruit crusher fruit mangala um yeah all sorts of different names like that but essentially all it is is a a hopper that leads down to a rather gnarly set of teeth that will mangle your fruit up when you spin the handle so all of the defrosted apples they came out of the freezer they defrosted overnight they went into the mangulator thingy me bob it got all crushed up and then i used the second piece of new equipment i have [Music] i just realized i lied to you before the manga later i got off aliexpress this i got off trademe so this once again very similar things similar concepts all over the place this one happens to be made all out of stainless steel welded together sometimes they would fruit or whatever it is that you want to crush and press goes into the basket here the lid goes down on top and some sort of crank hydraulic press or screw press goes on top to press the fruit down i was super impressed with this thing it pressed those apples wonderfully a couple of tips if you haven't used one of these before it is almost like oh what's a good example it's like kneading fresh dough i make pizza a lot needing fresh pizza dough you need it you need it it gets tighter and tighter you have to let it sit and relax for a little while before you can work it again you know depending on what stage you're at this is pretty much the same you tighten it down a bunch of juice comes out it gets really really tight and harder to push it down any further you let it sit for five minutes and when you come back it turns out that you can press it quite easily again and get a bunch more juice out so out of those 18 kilos of frozen apples i ended up getting 10 liters of juice which was pretty crazy and even crazier to me that juice was at a original gravity of 1.068 which is pretty freaking good next i took the leftover apples from the original bunch plus an additional six kilos of apples and mangled them but i did not press them so just the straight crushed mangled apple whatever you want to call it went into the fermenter and i added the juice on in as well now at this point in time i was right on the border of uh thinking that there was enough liquid in there maybe not enough so i added another two liters of water just to make things a little bit more liquid and i also added in some pectines just to help break down that solid fruit as well for the yeast i decided to use ec triple 1 8 and i know that a bunch of you guys gave me feedback suggesting that there were better yeasts out there to use for this kind of thing and to be fair i actually i actually completely agree with you i used ec chip 118 for the juice because i wanted to know it was going to ferment because i wasn't entirely sure if you know juice out of a bottle would just ferment easily so for this experiment i thought i would keep the yeast the same so i can do more of a close comparison between fresh fruit and apple juice but i think what maybe we should do in the future is take everything i've learnt from this video and everything i've learned from the supermarket juice video put those together along with your comments and suggestions chuck them down below to make kind of the ultimate apple experience for distilling in terms of both ease production volume and taste does that sound fun if you're if you have ideas let me know down below anyway fermentation chugged along really nicely for about four days and then it slowed down considerably for about another four days and i just let it go because i assumed that it was going to take a little bit of extra time for the yeast to really get through and get all the sugar out of the apple even though it was mangled you know down to quite small bits i decided to give it a little bit of extra time but it did ferment out dry completely dry which means it was time to distill the stuff because i had a relatively small volume of liquid to distill i pretty quickly decided against doing a stripping run and a spirit run so i decided to use this still here which has a false bottom which meant i can put all the solid straight on into it and to use two plates and the idea behind that was that i could get to a pretty high abv with a one and done run once again not needing to do the the stripping run and spirit run i balanced both plates out that went smoothly i let it sit for about 10 minutes to sort of stratify on the plates that went smoothly i slowly opened the still up to run nice and slow to collect the the four shots and then the heads that went smoothly i used rolling cuts to find the hearts carried on collecting until they had a hunch that tails were coming soon and used rolling cuts again at the end to find the tails it all went smooth i ended up with 700 mils of distiller at 86 i proofed it down to 40 and i got left with this which is uh a little over one and a half liters of the fresh apple brandy what are these two you may be asking this is uh the straight brandy i kept the wii sample of it uh from the supermarket apple juice and this is the version that i blended back in with the wine so this is basically like i guess fortified apple wine apple port apple juice brandy fresh apple brandy i should say actually before we get stuck into this it was quite interesting seeing uh the different fractions coming off the still it started super freaking volatile like that um that i don't know it's almost uh hard to to smell hard to grasp fresh cut apples spell and that was so close to the crossover point between heads and hearts i i went slightly more heads than i normally would to get a little bit more of that real volatile um like crisp fresh cut like smell the knife after you've cut fresh apples that's kind of like what it was like what i wasn't expecting is down three quarts the way to the tails it almost tasted like toffee apple it was insanely like candy-ish and sweet but it had this awesome extra i can't think what else to describe it but a bite like the skin of an apple i guess you would call it but anyway it's time to taste this stuff and tell you how it turned out and of course compare it to the juice version i made last time but first a huge thank you to the patreons thank you so much patreons for being the awesome people you are in helping me do this as my full-time job i thoroughly appreciate it thanks guys anyway it was very very interesting so in the final distillate we get a little bit of both on the nose it has that mouth-watering you smell it and your mouth starts salivating aspect to it like fresh apple but it almo but it also has some of that richer deeper like red sweet apple aspect as well honestly the amount of flavor coming off this is kind of insane it's quite interesting yeah wow yep the same totally the same on the palette it is complex it is fresh it is bright it doesn't taste stewed it doesn't taste one-dimensional there's a lot going on really a lot going on and i'm really quite surprised at how drinkable and tame and approachable the alcohol side of things is considering that i did go looking for a little bit more of that kind of effervescent appley freshness up in the heads the funny thing is though i think if i served these two drinks to like 10 people and said tell me what each of them are made from i think more people would pick apple quicker with this one once again because it is just that it's a more one-dimensional flavor it's not bad in any way shape or form it just doesn't have that that freshness that brightness that mouth-watering almost mouth puckering aspect to it which is quite interesting this one yeah well that's that's really good okay that's gotten better so this is the version that i left in the bottles uh on a slight amount of yeast for a little while i've just uh taken it off and it has gone a little bit past kind of that raisiny figgy stewed appleness and it's gone almost not really but just a little bit ma mighty hmm i wonder if it's autolysis i don't know i'll make another video about that honestly i kind of feel like i shouldn't have poured this in this flight it's not all that relevant maybe i'll make another video on that if you guys are interested if the question is does the fresh apple version taste more like does it better represent fresh apples than the juice version the answer is just yes there's no debate about it in my mind but if we want to start talking about which one is best i feel like we need to start bringing in some sort of concept like is the the extra effort and the extra cost worth it because this one did cost more to make and it was a whole lot more of a pain in the ass now i i don't know i don't feel like i can answer that question for you because it's it's a relative thing for me yeah i would rather make this than this if i was going to do it again in the future but i can't help but think there has to be some sort of compromise in between the two maybe we can bring the two together and get the best from both worlds i feel like there's another video to be had here anyway guys if you like this video please hit the like button down below hit the subscribe button notification bell all of those good youtube things and i'll catch you next time guys keep on chasing the craft see ya

Channel: Still It

Views: 46,844

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Id: QToPdSHrhps

Length: 13min 18sec (798 seconds)

Published: Fri May 06 2022