Crab Apple Brandy

[Fiddleford]

Hello all. I'm starting a little empire of my own picking the apples of peoples backyard trees and they are all crab apple trees. I'm complacently new to brandy and most of my experience in spirits is with grain, I hear about how the spirits from fruit is a flavor that hits your taste buds right away and I know from experience that grains tend to hit your taste buds on the back end.

My method for the apples is to rinse them off then put them in my barrel and pour hot water on them to really sterilise them. then reboil that water and pour it on them again or boil them directly and let them sit to soften over night. after them just smash them with a stick in the barrel till I'm happy and top up the gunk with some more grain gunk which I'll get into next.

pretty much a ratio of some wheat to some barley that has been roasted, I can't malt because its averagely over 25 C which is when i notice malt to get slimy, I'm really experimenting here.

So all of this is lead up by some questions. I have never distilled a fruit in my life and I read in a lot of places fructose produces more methanol. I like to ask things like this because I don't know what to expect and I like to know what to expect.

Should I really try the grain with the fruit I read a few threads of people trying it then going off-grid on the topic.

Safety related tips are great and always looked upon. For clarification I read on it and now I have questions, I may have missed some things or skimmed over them, and as always I appreciate any input and advice in the subject.

[Shine0n]

This is just a suggestion but if you have a way of chopping and juicing the apples, I'd go that route rather than adding malt.
Apple is a hard enough to capture, then if you add malt it may never be seen/found.

I could be completely wrong but from my own experience with apples gone wrong, I'd stick with chopping and juicing.

if that isn't an option, crush them as good as you can and use a nylon strainer bag and squeeze them.
Also there is a thread somewhere about an ass press... I have no idea exactly where but if you use the search bar you should easily find a few threads about juicing fruit.

Good luck, someone who is more experienced than me will soon show up.

[Fiddleford]

I thought on it some bit and realised its not nearly cold enough at night for them to be entirely sweet. My new plan is to mash them with my mill after cutting them to size then throwing hot water over them maybe once or twice to grab any sugars, after that fill the container with water and the pulp from the apples and give it a stir for a few days just do that to drop out any starches and collect the said starches, remove the pulp and add malt to the starchy liquid to convert it into sugars. They are at full size and from some knowledge around my area one bushel of crab apples is about 40 pounds which in a perfect world would yield me 18.21 kg of sugars and equal out to a 5.5% mash for 5 bushels on 20 gallons. the grain mash I would do seperatly and blend the distillate after the spirit run of both washes.

[cranky]

I personally don't like anything you are proposing.

Full disclosure I don't do crabs as a stand alone but occasionally mix them in with other apples.

As far as apples, if the amount of alcohol matters to you begin by finding out exactly what SG the juice is at. If you are actually trying to get apple flavor and not just free vodka don't water anything down, don't boil it, don't add anything and don't mix it with grain. Just make straight apple juice into hard cider and distill it. If you are concerned with wild yeast or something nasty pasteurize it after pressing and what I mean by pasteurizing is bring it up to no more than 170f. You only have to hold it there for something like a minute or two then cool it as rapidly as you can. Heating it causes loss of flavor.

Mixing it with grains will throw off the cuts. Apples require completely different cuts and a different way of thinking about cuts than grains and can be very difficult to get right without doing a bunch of other stuff that will remove flavor, cover it up or fight with it.

[Fiddleford]

The original intent of this is cuts I'm unfamiliar with them I haven't made any actual cuts up to this point other then obvious heads and tails, I never saw the value in it just recently I got my 5 gallon still. I figured I could practice on such a large volume and if all goes to shit I do enjoy vodka, I could store that away for future experiments. on the topic of the collected starches, I could do the pure apple juice ferment and I could do the starch brewed in with malt I really don't want to let the starches go to waste, I have nothing to do for the next while so I don't mind putting in all the work, it keeps me from twiddling my thumbs.

[Shine0n]

If you used the juice from them, made a cider and distilled it imho it would be best.
Take the pressings and add a bit of sugar to them to get 1.065ish and make that. Oh add water to this portion!

I gust looked and there is a crabapple wash thread here on this page so take a reading and see what they thought good or bad or some advice they got about doing what they intended

[Fiddleford]

yup that's something you gotta spoon feed yourself. I think I'll use my 7/8" copper pipe to decor the apples then smash em and drain the juice off the pulp ferment the resulting juice and make the brandy from that. I'll leave the starch thing out of this post and just post the notes somewhere after I got around to doing it, I was going to mash em core and all but the seeds might give me hydrogen cyanide? This way I run in the house so that's not favourable, another plus is I can make crap apple ketchup which my family loves apparently

[cranky]

I think I'll use my 7/8" copper pipe to decor the apples

7/8" seems awfully large to core crabapples. Are these actually crabapples or just small apples? I get a lot of small apples that are not crabs, they are just small apples. Wild apples are often small and bitter but the worst apples make the best brandy.

I really don't want to let the starches go to waste

You seem to have some sort of misconception about this. Of the carbohydrates in apples only about 2% are starch, the majority is already sugars.

I was going to mash em core and all but the seeds might give me hydrogen cyanide?

A single apple seed contains approximately 0.49 milligrams if cyanide compounds which are not released if the seed stays whole. It would take approximately 143 seeds to be a lethal dose. I do some crazy stuff with apples and don't break the seeds, they are tougher than you may think. Try smashing a few and see if it breaks the seeds, pitting a million crabapples can be extremely tedious, I know, I have done it, and if you don't have to why bother. Now if you are going to make something else out of them, that's another story.

[Fiddleford]

I have a few sizes of copper pipe to my disposal, the apples we have here are all crab apples the people who have the "better" apples trees live in more remote areas or have cut them down. It doesn't have to be my 7/8" pipe I probably should have mentioned that. with the carbohydrates the low we get here is 15 C at night and that's only for maybe and hour or two and I'm told that's not low enough for the apples to be sweet. I wont have them will the end of the week I need to go pick them but for now I'm just trying to think up a few game plans

[cranky]

I have a few sizes of copper pipe to my disposal, the apples we have here are all crab apples the people who have the "better" apples trees live in more remote areas or have cut them down. It doesn't have to be my 7/8" pipe I probably should have mentioned that. with the carbohydrates the low we get here is 15 C at night and that's only for maybe and hour or two and I'm told that's not low enough for the apples to be sweet. I wont have them will the end of the week I need to go pick them but for now I'm just trying to think up a few game plans

First sweetness is not necessarily an indication of sugar content. It's best to test a sample and see what kind of brix / S.G. you are actually dealing with. My experience is if an apple, crab or otherwise, is ripe it's ripe.

I feel the best recipe for apples is juice, yeast and time, nothing else but that's just my opinion.

[Fiddleford]

Thank you for the advice Cranky I'll remember it while I'm picking an I'll give out my results

[The Baker]

Why bother coring?

There won't be enough cyanide to hurt you, it's only a LOT of extra work, and you get LESS stuff to ferment...

Geoff

[Fiddleford]

after mashing the fruit with something I'll put it through a mill to get everything all juicy. I'm also making condiments from the pulp that my young niece and nephew and family will be eating so even if its a minuscule amount I will rest a little easier without the seeds in the pulp

[Fiddleford]

I need a juicer for these apples

[cranky]

I need a juicer for these apples

It often happens that people wind up with a bunch of apples before they realize they need a way to juice them. I don't know about Canada but here Goodwills often have them pretty cheap. In a pinch you can load the pulp into a pillow case and squeeze by hand or make what's called an ass press out of a couple of buckets, or fab up any number of press designs or even find places that rent them. There are lots of options for getting the juice out.

[The Baker]

When we owned the bakery I used the big butcher's mincer we used to mince (dunno why but you Americans seem to say 'grind') the veg for the pasties (veg and some meat in pastry).
Had to cut the apples in maybe four and press them down with the big plastic pusher; no problems.
Didn't peel or core, if I remember right a lot of the peel rose to the top of the ferment anyway.
I believe the peels carry a lot of flavour and also the natural yeasts I usually allowed to work their magic.
I have a theory that the fruit carries its own best yeast. Usually.

Geoff