Lets get carried away with fruity goodness

[cranky]

OK, gotta make a newbie move here and ask a first time question. First, because the 4 bushels of apples I have are drops, I've decided it might be prudent to pasteurize the juice before it goes to the fermenters. I was also thinking about doing a sugarhead with the pomace. I'm not finding a lot of info about recipes. My idea was to add water in equal proportion to the volume of pomace and about 1 lb of sugar to 1 gallon of water - with sugar adjustments depending on the OG. Does this sound reasonable? For the same reason, I would probably also cook the pomace/water/sugar mix. Any advice on a good pomace/Calvados recipe, or a link, would be appreciated.

I actually pasteurized some of my juice that will be used for cider to give away next year but if it is going to all be run through the still I wouldn't bother.

I recall (I think) NZChris talked about using the pomace like that and said not to go higher with the sugar than the original juice. Bushman made what around here is commonly called apple grappa (properly it would be apple marc brandy) last year but I don't know if he added sugar or not, I think it is detailed in his apple thread. Some people seem to add just water then let the pomace ferment then re-press and run after fermenting or steam strip. I tried doing something with the pomace after pressing but it took up more space than I have so never did anything else with it.

[S-Cackalacky]

Thanks Cranky. I read that thread where terminology was hashed out. I also referred to it as Calvados which also isn't the right term. The only reason I want to do the sugarhead with pomace is because I will be using the ass press and won't be able to press it out very dry. Seems a waste to just throw it out. I'll try to find Bushman's write up on using pomace, otherwise I'll just go with the half-assed recipe in my previous post. And yes, the goal would be to keep it as near 1.050 as possible.

I decided to pasteurize because they're drops and I don't want to take a chance on picking something up from the ground that will turn it to vinegar. Maybe I'm just being paranoid.

I still didn't get any grinding done today. I set out this morning to pick up some EC-1118 at the brew shop and got caught in a godawful traffic backup. Didn't get home til near 2:00pm. I got my mud mixer sharpened up this afternoon and should be good to go tomorrow AM.

[jb-texshine]

Cranky,
No sulfites,check.
1118,check.
Only sugar if below 1.050 og. Gonna strain skins and pulp after ferment for a sugarhead though
These persimmons have the heaviest bloom(blush?)of wild yeast I've ever seen! I think I may try to isolate some for use later,but that'll be another thread...
Thanks for the reply,ill be sure to let everyone know how it works out.
Jb

[cranky]

I decided to pasteurize because they're drops and I don't want to take a chance on picking something up from the ground that will turn it to vinegar. Maybe I'm just being paranoid.

You have a point, Now that you mention it I think I pasteurized one pressing because when I put the bucket in my car I knocked the lid off and found a swarm of fruit flies when I got out of work.

[cranky]

Cranky,
No sulfites,check.
1118,check.
Only sugar if below 1.050 og. Gonna strain skins and pulp after ferment for a sugarhead though
These persimmons have the heaviest bloom(blush?)of wild yeast I've ever seen! I think I may try to isolate some for use later,but that'll be another thread...
Thanks for the reply,ill be sure to let everyone know how it works out.
Jb

Looking forward to reading about it. You might even consider something like 1122 or D-47 to try to keep some of the fruity notes.

[cranky]

I just sampled the juice from the sweet apples that I have concentrated. I concentrated from 1 gallon down to 1/2 gallon and the SG is at 1.160. With results like that I am going to go ahead and buy the expensive sweet mead yeast because I have used it before with high gravity wines. It has a low alcohol tolerance of only about 11% so it gives me good residual sweetness that a dessert wine needs.

[jb-texshine]

So...rt plan wrong yeast??? I am definitely looking to keep as much fruit scent and flavor as possible. Sigh,Back to the yeast charts I go...lol.
I have more fun figuring out what how and why than consuming the product.well....almost

[Jimbo]

jbtex, here's a writeup I did on 3 different yeasts. fyi http://homedistiller.org/forum/viewtopi ... 0#p7121964

[contrahead]

I wouldn't use any sulfites for anything that's going into a still, I don't use them at all for anything, but especially in a still they can carry over some sulfur smell...

If used as indicated (about 60 -70 ppm) before beginning a new wine must or beer wort, this small level of sulfur dioxide disappears completely as it is consumed by killing bacteria, wild yeast and mold spores or by bonding to oxygen.

Introducing sulfur dioxide after fermentation and before bottling of wine & beer however is done to trap oxygen and halt its undesirable affect. For distillation purposes, adding sulfur dioxide after the fermentation - would be inappropriate.

[jb-texshine]

Thanks jimbo,took me a minute to find it in there,lol. As long as the taste and smell come through in the distillation I think ill be good with the 1118.

[Jimbo]

Thanks jimbo,took me a minute to find it in there,lol. As long as the taste and smell come through in the distillation I think ill be good with the 1118.

I linked right to the post? Maybe because I sort backwards, newest first?

Ive used 1118 for years. Its a great yeast. Others are a gamble but can produce great results. Cuts are trickier when you have more esters too so the crazier the yeast, the more youll scratch your head when making cuts.

[wtfdskin]

On the fruit subject, but not apples. Has anyone used one of those steam juicers? Loooing for something better for blueberries, raspberries, etc.

[jb-texshine]

Lol,not directly to it,page two of your apple topic.the exact post was on pg 3-4. I appreciate the link,period though. If others make the cuts harder then I'm gonna go 1118for sure lol. I was going to Google a few yeast spec charts from manufacturers(breeders?)... First hand experience from someone that's used it is always better than mfg hype.
much appreciated
Jb

[S-Cackalacky]

On the fruit subject, but not apples. Has anyone used one of those steam juicers? Loooing for something better for blueberries, raspberries, etc.

I was talking to a guy and his wife in the brew shop today about juicing apples and they kept bringing up steam extraction. I didn't want to seem like a complete idiot, so I just nodded my head. I didn't have a clue what they were talking about.

[wtfdskin]

A fellow shiner in my area bought one, used it for grapes. Said it works good, reviews I read seem ok. Seems like a good option and less mess for those tiny seed fruits like raspberries. I'm reallt fussy about appearance of my drinks. Dont like floaters

[cranky]

I've used a sort steam extraction method on blackberries, sort of, but not a proper steam extractor. freezing works just as well if not better and doesn't change the flavor.

jb-texshine, looks like Jimbo pretty much answered your question but where I grew up in Oklahoma there were so many persimmons available after the first frost that it would be easy to do multiple runs and compare results. I think you will be very happy with 1118 for your first fruit run and can play around with yeasts in the future.

[jb-texshine]

I've used a sort steam extraction method on blackberries, sort of, but not a proper steam extractor. freezing works just as well if not better and doesn't change the flavor.

jb-texshine, looks like Jimbo pretty much answered your question but where I grew up in Oklahoma there were so many persimmons available after the first frost that it would be easy to do multiple runs and compare results. I think you will be very happy with 1118 for your first fruit run and can play around with yeasts in the future.

Cranky I'm about 15 minutes from grant ok,on the Texas side . There are large tracts of land all around this area designated as wildlife management areas -public access- that are covered in persimmons. Wild plums too. The persimmons though,grow at a density of 2-3 trees per acre. I've seen deer stand on their back legs to get them off the trees. There is four or five literally growing in the ditch within a half mile of my door and one huge one in the center of a neighbors two acre yard that's in danger of losing limbs its so loaded down. This neighbors owns a 500acre pecan farm and when I ask to pick the persimmons he told when they are ripe enough for me to let him know and he would bring the tractor with a tree shaker for me. I think I'm gonna end up with so many I can't lose!

[cranky]

Damn jb-texshine, that sounds like a damn good deal. Growing up we had a stand of them about 20 feet from our front door but there were others all over the place. We had some hard shell pecan trees too and the wild plums were all up and down the river banks. The one success I had with distilling in my youth was a persimmon brandy in a solar still that I now only have a very vague memory of. My wife grew up in Southeast Texas and just read your post and is now talking about how she misses the sweet soft persimmons and the pecans. I'd really like to make some persimmon brandy but it is one of the few fruits we don't have up here.

[S-Cackalacky]

Jb-texshine, I don't think there's been a lot written here about persimmons. I think I remember one thread from about a year ago. We have them here in VA, but they are hit and miss from one year to the next. There seems to be some this year for the first time in about 3 years. I love the flavor of the well ripened fruit, but not so much the under ripened ones. They can be very astringent if not fully ripened. It's such an unusual and unique flavor, I would think it would make an interesting brandy.

Good luck with it and keep us posted.

[S-Cackalacky]

OK boys, reaching my maximum level of frustration with the mud mixer apple grinding. Currently taking a long break with a sizable mess on the basement floor. I'm sure you would all get a good laugh if you could be a fly-on-the-wall for this one.

Before even getting started, I found that I had probably sharpened the wrong edge of the blade - I sharpened the smaller (inside) edge of the blade. First try with grinding, I found that it basically just moved the apples around in the bucket. So, I broke out the angle grinder and sharpened the other edge and tried again. This time it chopped them up pretty good. I had a lot of problems keeping the bucket from spinning with the blade. I got it settled down somewhat by putting the bucket in a milk crate and stuffing towels and boards around it. I finally got rolling along pretty well and got through the first five gallon bucket and dumped the pulp in the ass press strainer.

So, I got most of the way through the 2nd five gallon bucket and noticed pulp accumulating around the bottom of the milk crate. I stopped and emptied what was left in the bucket into the ass press strainer and found that the mixer blade had knocked a huge hole in the side of the bucket. So, now there's wet pulp all over the floor to be cleaned up and 6 more buckets of apples yet to be ground up and processed.

Anyway, now I'm gonna have some lunch and repeat over and over to myself, "It's gonna be the best damned apple brandy anybody every made.".

[yakattack]

Omg s-cack that's funny. I'm sorry I don't mean to laugh at your pain but it is funny. Do you have the lid on the bucket?

Also just a tip.. I didn't sharpen mine to avoid that, and haven't broken my barrel yet (15 gallon. )

Cranky uses a guide and a stabilizing block, to keep it centered, also the thicker the bucket, the better.

[S-Cackalacky]

Yak, before I sharpened the other edge, I tried just reversing the direction of the drill to make the larger edge the leading edge. It worked somewhat, but was leaving a lot of big chunks. I think I'll try putting one bucket inside another. At least that way, if I knock a hole in the inside bucket, it won't leak out on the floor.

I'm now thinking very seriously about building one of Ben Stiller's PVC pipe roller grinders before next year's apple season. We'll see - maybe I just haven't found the groove yet.

[cranky]

Sorry SC I'm laughing too. I found that I needed to keep the number of apples in the bucket below 1/3 of the bucket. Another thing was I has to dull and round off the leading edge of the lower corner to help keep it from digging into the bucket. Also as Yak said, the original setup had the lid on the bucket with the shaft extending up through it and I had to keep the lid locked down and my foot on top, as Yak described in another thread "Captain Morgan style".

I will also say the newest incarnation with the bearing/centering blocks top and bottom make a big difference.

[Jimbo]

Thanks for the laugh SC, but sorry for the frustrations. Remind me to tell my garbage disposer apple grinder story some day. My real success with apples didnt come until after being so frustrated with my own rube goldberg contraptions, that I studied the hardware at a local small orchard. The grinder and press pump were driven off a PTO belt off an old farmall. The grinder made perfect sense how it worked and the press too. So I made a smaller version of each and now chew through 1500 lbs without the headache.

I figgered if that solution worked great 50 years ago, and is still working great today, why the hell am I taking a different approach. It more fun to invent than copy, after all copying is what the Chinese do right, but its a fine balance, gotta toss pride aside sometimes and realize reinventing the same wheel is foolish when the masters have it nice and round already.

[cranky]

If you build a flying car you don't need wheels That said if I had an actual budget I would probably have bought or built a conventional grinder and press long ago, but I am actually very happy with my current bladed chopper design and think it will last a long time and do many thousands of pounds of apples.

Now I can tell you guys what I have been up to this morning. The pear must that I have had sitting for a few months now developed a white scum on top, not a lacto infection and I don't think it is anything serious but I finally found the time to go ahead and run it. It was only 8 gallons and the O.G. was pretty low at only about 1.040 and I intended to save some to give to the owner of the tree but with the white stuff decided I needed to run it all. I did save one bottle of it to either make a carbonated Perry out of or to use for tempering. I had some pears I was saving for some juice but the wife threw them out.

Anyway, the run was small and the ABV of the must was low but the run went well. I heated it up much slower than usual because I remember reading something Paulinka posted about the benefits of a slow heat up of about 50 minutes Vs the usual 20 or so and this wash foamed like crazy all the way up to the bottom plate. I'm discovering that different things run differently in the M2 (AKA Bubblicious) so of course the pear did too. I wasn't going to use my parrot because it wasn't going to be a big run and I don't really like to use it on anything less than 10 gallons of low wines but my new testing cylinder was much taller than the last one and when I took the first sample to test I dropped the alcameter about an inch and watched as it went all the way to the floor Fortunately only the cylinder broke so I had to set up the parrot which worked out OK. All in all I collected twelve 1/4 pint samples mostly between 75 - 88% ABV that all smell wonderful and I am looking forward to the blending. I know I won't get very much but it was certainly worth the effort. I wish I had managed to do more pears but now I have 2 carboys freed up to get the plum wine started as soon as I figure out where the hell I set those airlocks down.

[Jimbo]

I didnt intend to diss your approach Cranks, it looks slick as snot. My first 2 trys left lots to be desired tho. As far as budget goes, Im a cheap bastard too, my grinder press was built for free with stuff I had laying around. That cant be said for Try #2 which was based on a new stainless impeller garbage disposer. Didnt work for shit, but thats another story.

I like the flying car comment Always cool to build a better mousetrap. I think the apple pressing mousetrap has been pret well polished tho, fruit and drunkards been around since before Moses, working on cracking that nut.

I have a tree full of pears I need to pick! Along with the apples. I decided to take a vacation day Friday...... HD Anonymous..... please help, I have succumbed to burning vacation days, not to take the family on exciting new adventures to far away places, but to create alcohol in my shed......

[Wooday]

OK boys, reaching my maximum level of frustration with the mud mixer apple grinding. Currently taking a long break with a sizable mess on the basement floor. I'm sure you would all get a good laugh if you could be a fly-on-the-wall for this one.

Before even getting started, I found that I had probably sharpened the wrong edge of the blade - I sharpened the smaller (inside) edge of the blade. First try with grinding, I found that it basically just moved the apples around in the bucket. So, I broke out the angle grinder and sharpened the other edge and tried again. This time it chopped them up pretty good. I had a lot of problems keeping the bucket from spinning with the blade. I got it settled down somewhat by putting the bucket in a milk crate and stuffing towels and boards around it. I finally got rolling along pretty well and got through the first five gallon bucket and dumped the pulp in the ass press strainer.

So, I got most of the way through the 2nd five gallon bucket and noticed pulp accumulating around the bottom of the milk crate. I stopped and emptied what was left in the bucket into the ass press strainer and found that the mixer blade had knocked a huge hole in the side of the bucket. So, now there's wet pulp all over the floor to be cleaned up and 6 more buckets of apples yet to be ground up and processed.

Anyway, now I'm gonna have some lunch and repeat over and over to myself, "It's gonna be the best damned apple brandy anybody every made.".

I'm glad I'm not the only one that blew through the bucket wall with the mixer blender.
It's a hell of a learning curve.

My idiot method is to stand on the bucket, fire up the drill, and when it gets up to speed push it down into the fruit at full speed, pumping it straight up and down a couple times. Not safe, but it works and I'm on my own here

[nerdybrewer]

From looking at the builds some of you guys are using I am getting the idea of a huge immersion blender.
An immersion blender works great for chopping up and liquefying and a really big one might work well for chopping up a large amount of fruit.
The bucket & chopper method seems to be going in that direction, but as in the immersion blender it might be helpful to build a shroud over the chopper part.
Then using the method of shoving it down into the fruit and raising up and down wouldn't have the possible side effect of chopping through the side of the bucket.

[cranky]

I didnt intend to diss your approach Cranks,

It wasn't taken that way at all. I've seen the whizbang design (Garbage disposal) before and never heard much good about it. It's true that the grinding and pressing has become pretty refined over time and often the old ways are the best.

[S-Cackalacky]

Well, I gave it up for the day after processing only 3 buckets. I punched through another bucket wall. This time it was nested in a second bucket, so it didn't make so much of a mess. I'm pretty well exhausted after all the stress and cleaning. I'll try some of the things suggested - especially rounding over the corners so they don't dig into the bucket as much. I also like the idea of hovering over the apples and then lowering the mixer down into them. From the git-go I was only putting a dozen or so apples into the bucket at a time. I also like the idea of a shroud, but I wonder if something like that can be easily made. With the way the mixer is made, a shroud would probably need to turn with the blade which could also eat into the side of the bucket.

BTW - I was using a lid. The lid started out with a 3/4" hole in the middle for the mixer shaft. It eventually increased to several inches after the shaft chipped several sizable shards away.

The ass press isn't doing a very good job either. After 3 buckets of apples, I'm guessing that I might have a little over 1 gallon of juice. From today's experience, I can see that I need to put some effort into upgrading my methods for next year. I think I can do a pretty good job of it on the cheap. I already have the beams for a press frame and can get a decent hydraulic jack from Harbor Freight for 20 to 30 dollars.

Anyway, back at it tomorrow - God help me.