peach brandy

[invisigoth]

the adventure started when i went to the orchard to get my peaches. lady points to a pallet of boxes of over ripe peaches taken out from the cool room and says "pick the ones you want". 3 hours later when it started to rain i walked away with about 43kg of peaches. :-D

there are a myriad of ways to process the fruit. since they were kinda mushy and there wasn't enough room in the freezer for them all, i decided to process them as soon as i got home. i cut the peaches in half around the stone, twisted which freed up one half of the fruit from the stone, cut the other half in half again and pulled it free and chucked the pieces into a food processor and the stones in the bin. some people keep the stones for the fermenter... i didn't this time round.

the food processor has about 3l or so capacity. 10 seconds or so and the fruit is pureed very nicely. since i was a bit paranoid about this starting to ferment from wild yeasts and stuff as i went, i poured the puree into a 5l food grade plastic bucket. with the next load, i added a crushed campden tablet and then carefully mixed each load into the bucket till it was full. took 6kg of unstoned fruit to fill each 5l bucket with puree. i realise this is probably not the quickest way to do this. :-B

once i had 5 full buckets, i pureed the rest into large plastic zip lock bags and chucked them in the freezer, allowing room for expansion.

i emptied two of the buckets into my 25l brew bucket, added 1 teaspoon of citric acid and stirred it in slowly, then filled the fermenter to 23l with puree and bagged the excess. added another 1.5 teaspoons of citric acid and stirred this in. left this for 24 hours but kept an eye on it. i've heard of some people having wild yeast fermentation start even after adding the standard 1 tab/5l. :sad:

after 24 hours with no sign of wild yeast and smelling nice and infection free, i pitched my yeast. when i was looking threw a few hb sites i saw "prestige pot distillation yeast - perfect for fruit brandies". yeh.. well, when the sachets arrived, they were big, heavy, and claimed to be for 25l. can you say turbo? but.. if you get past their instructions that talk about adding a bunch of sugar to the fruit, into the fine print, it says "also usable for 100l fruit wine". so i divided it up into 4 small sterile containers, checked to see if they seemed fairly homogeneous, and pitched one of the containers. no need to add any nutrients since that's with the yeast.

within 2 hours it had started fermenting. :happy-partydance: after 12 hours the pulp had risen to a tad past the 25l mark. i could see some pulp clinging to the sides of the lower stem of the airlock, but it never went past that and the level seems to have dropped. :pray:

i think 20l in a 25l fermenter is probably the way to go for this stuff. i think i just got lucky.

[kiwikeg]

Nice a Afrikaneer mate gave me a bottle of peach brandy

hakkies.jpg

it was really quite nice once you got a taste for it. I think it might have been a novelty brand as it came with barbed wire wrapped around the bottle.
this stuff was 50%abv.
going by the taste I think you would want a generous tails cut in the final blend

[invisigoth]

Nice a Afrikaneer mate gave me a bottle of peach brandy. it was really quite nice once you got a taste for it.
going by the taste I think you would want a generous tails cut in the final blend

that's a pretty savage bottle... i'd hate to be in the bar fight that that got loose in! :laughing-rolling:

yeh, from what i've heard the most important flavour components are hidden in the tails, and not in sequential cuts, so you need to check all the tail cuts so you don't skip something important. :handgestures-thumbupleft:

since i'm still very much a beginner, i can't make my cuts from the still, so i do 50ml cuts for the first 300ml after 100ml forshots. i might have to do something similar with the tails. it would be nice if i got a couple of litres of low wines out of this, but i'm guessing less. i have seen sugar tables that say 7.9% sugar for peaches, but that doesn't specify whole fruit or just the flesh. assuming that's whole fruit, thats 27.6kg of peaches translating to a tad over 2kg of sugar. in a perfect world i think that translates into just shy of 1.5l of 100% abv. :think:

[BackyardBrewer]

Interesting about the tails... When I was starting out I accidentally added a jar of tails cuts and as soon as I watered it back down it went really cloudy. Wouldn't the same thing happen with your peach brandy?

[crow]

Interesting about the tails... When I was starting out I accidentally added a jar of tails cuts and as soon as I watered it back down it went really cloudy. Wouldn't the same thing happen with your peach brandy?

ya can sometimes chill it and strain the jellyfish out

[BackyardBrewer]

So heads is hangover and tails is flavour? Maybe it's a TPW in a reflux issue but my tails reek like ass. Wouldn't add them to anything 'cept maybe the lawn mower?
:-))

[crow]

So heads is hangover and tails is flavour? Maybe it's a TPW in a reflux issue but my tails reek like ass. Wouldn't add them to anything 'cept maybe the lawn mower?
:-))

Most tails are shit but there are some useful favours and oils in the tails of some washes. Some ppl use late tails to get rum oils for instance , not me though I'm with you knuckles cepten putting in in my mower that is ;-) . I think it would take more skill than I currently have to sort out desirable from undesirable tail compounds

[invisigoth]

well i don't think putting tails into your mower is a good idea.. that's what fores are for! :laughing-rolling:

if it smells bad i'm not gonna bother tasting it, but other wise, i guess you gotta be in it to win it. when i'm doing my spirit runs, when the tails come out cloudy i shut down the boiler. with the stuff i've done so far i've never gone far enough into the tails to have them go cloudy on dilution. i'm actualy considering using some of the peach puree i still have to proof the spirit once it's been blended, or at least some of it. then filter the pulp after some aging.

croweater's comment "Right well fruit season is almost on us so if you were looking at doing a fruit brandy start looking around for orchards now that you could get cheap or reject fruit from for "jam" "
is pretty well much exactly what i did. the peach season here is about half way through. the cling stones are done and now its the free stones. if this goes well i might try a different type of peach next season. :scared-eek:

[BackyardBrewer]

My tails smell awful well before they get cloudy. Maybe it's a reflux a d TPW combo. Maybe molasses etc in a pot still has different tails smells.

[crow]

If yaz are in a stone fruit district (not as many as there once was) apricots would be started too. morparks would be on the go already but story's hunters and kingstons wouldn't have yet I'd imagine, cannery grade cots prices were crimanally low yrs ago and I can't imagine things have improved much but this grade of over ripe fruit is just perfect for our needs ;-)

[invisigoth]

welp.. the way it took off and the expected sugar content, i reckoned it would be done in about 4 days, and sure enough after 4 days the fermentation dropped to next to nothing, but then it started up again, very slowly. i don't know if it was the yeast i pitched, or something else munching on the must. anyways, in another 4 days it came to a halt. during this time i'd been stirring the cap in every couple of days, and it never smelled off like it was infected. when i went to strip it, 1.5l @20% abv was what i ended up with.. disappointing. :crying-blue:

not sure what to do, while the backset was still boiling hot i swapped out the pot head for the original lid and whacked in a bung with an airlock and a piece of filter wool soaked with 70% ethanol stuffed into the top. i kept the filter wool moist with ethanol while it cooled, then took out the filter wool and added some water with a little sodium metabisulfite to lock it. ;-)

today i grabbed 2kg of sugar and some bicarb from the woolies. i figured i'd take a punt that there might still be some flavour to be had in the backset, so i dissolved the sugar in hot water and added 0.4g (a hair under 1/8 of a teaspoon) of citric acid. i gave it a good stir and left it for a while before adding it to a sterilised fermenter. i did a quick ph test of the backset which was 4.0. i racked most of it to the fermenter, stirring the sugar syrup in every so often till i had 20l. then i added some bicarb disolved in water and stirred it in, gave it a little while, then retested and kept adding small amounts with a rest till the ph came up to 4.5 adjusted for temp. cant say how much bicarb i added exactly... i was in bucket chemistry mode at this stage. :music-deathmetal:

this will never be the same as fermenting uncooked pulp, and it may end up tasting like crap, but i figured it is worth a try. i'm not prepared to call this brandy, but hopefully if mid way through the strip it gives a hint that it might be ok, i'll blend it with the first strip run which has some very peachy smell to it. i hope this turns out ok! :pray:

[bt1]

I'm rather impressed with the efforts and process used here....wd

especially using the bicarb to offset pH and attention to keeping infection at bay... most folk just skip it altogether...keeps us updated please would like to know the end results.

impressed
bt1

[invisigoth]

especially using the bicarb to offset pH and attention to keeping infection at bay... most folk just skip it altogether...keeps us updated please would like to know the end results.

hehe well whilst i have been following your ph experiments, :handgestures-thumbupleft: it was more a combination of a little basic knowledge and following some of the methodology of the hooks rum recipe. :))
any fermentation is going to drop the ph as it goes. i don't know if the ph of the backset is just the result of fermentation, or if in addition the extra energy supplied by boiling the crap out of it allows the formation of other acidic compounds that would otherwise not form at room temp. :-B just like in the hooks rum it's recommended to adjust the dunder with bicarb for subsequent generations, i figured it was prudent to check the ph and adjust. the yeast i was using recommends that between 4 and 5 is it's happy place. unfortunately, after making sure that ph was right, nutrients were right, temp was right and the backset/wash had been adequately aerated... nothing, noda... she failed to launch. :crying-blue:

i tried tapping off some of the backset into a sterile bottle, pitching some more yeast and once it was active pitching it. it never activated. i suspect too much nutrient (it has nutrients with it like a turbo, only not as much) may have too high an osmotic pressure and the yeast didn't like it. i pitched it anyway, and 12 hours after that, still nothing. in the end i mixed up the backset, tapped off again, and this time threw in some ec-1118. we have a winner, that got going easily, pitched that and now its taking off. taking the lid off the fermenter always makes me nervous. i'm just paranoid enough that if i could afford it, i'd do all my fermenting in a lamina flow cabinet with hepa filters ..... 8-}

[bt1]

invis,

you make me laugh here..nervously...

i'm just paranoid enough that if i could afford it, i'd do all my fermenting in a lamina flow cabinet with hepa filters

some interesting pts you raise here..

next you'll be tubbing up your prep and work areas with industrial grade sterilisers.. Oops to close to my own heart :oops:

[invisigoth]

bt1:

next you'll be tubbing up your prep and work areas with industrial grade sterilisers.. Oops to close to my own heart :oops:

i can neither confirm nor deny :whistle:

welp, stripped the spiked backset today. 2.5l@40% abv and the stuff smelled peachy. will add it to the low wines from the original run and do a spirit run next weekend. one thing i have learnt is that hot twice cooked peach backset smells horrible! :puke-huge:

[emptyglass]

You could try throwing both your strips back on some of the pulp if you wanted.

Stone fruit stuff yeilds low, thats why lots try to spike it with sugar, but that seems to make the heads cut larger, or give bad hangover.

You beer guys worry too much.

[invisigoth]

You could try throwing both your strips back on some of the pulp if you wanted.

Stone fruit stuff yeilds low, thats why lots try to spike it with sugar, but that seems to make the heads cut larger, or give bad hangover.

You beer guys worry too much.

the combination of the two runs will give me something close i think. since this is no longer brandy in my eyes, i was planning on adding peach pulp to the final blend after the spirit run to age.

produce rarely seems to follow the script. based on a table of sugar content in fruit, there should have been about 2kg of sugar, which is why i added 2kg to the backset for the second time around. :mrgreen:

you shiners don't worry enough! :teasing-neener:

[invisigoth]

did the spirit run. havn't finished picking out my cuts yet, but it certainly has a peachy character. a bit harsher than i'd have liked, but i suspect aging will help. there seems to be a very feint bitterness you don't notice till after it's gone down. i defrosted the rest of the peach pulp for a melomel, had a quick taste, and none of the batches of pulp tasted sweet. if anything there was a slight sourness (but not in an infected way). i guess that explains the poor yield the first time round. :crying-blue:

if i'm going to age the blended product with some puréed peaches, it ain't gonna be with this stuff. :naughty:

[invisigoth]

finshed going through my cuts. 2.5l@40% went into the still, roughly 2.1 came out. of that, after blending i kept 900ml @73% abv. after the first 100ml as forshots the next 300ml were taken as 50ml cuts, then 100ml cuts and back to 50ml for the last 500ml. starting from the middle i worked my way up to the heads and stopped when i felt a definite burn different from the ethanol. didn't include that cut. working my way into the tails, not any of the cuts smelled like wet cardboard, wet dog, arse, or any of the other unpleasant odours people have used to describe tails. just smelled peachy. i kept going till one cut made me go "eww". :shifty:
can't describe it. it smelled ok, wasn't bitter, just a little voice inside my head saying "that ain't right". i managed to get some more peaches which gave me a nice pleasantly sweet pulp, so i think i'll age it with that for a few months before straining. <shrug> brandy it ain't, but i think it should still be a pleasant drop.

next season i'll give it another go i think, by which stage i think my bubbler will be ready :laughing-rolling: :whistle:

[BackyardBrewer]

So to summarise, you got around 10% return on your initial batch? If I'm reading right you pulled around 2L off a 25L mash?

Is that about right? What amount of drinking strength stock do you reckon you pulled?