My first prickly pear shine

[miss_mash]

So, last week I got inspired to experiment with Prickly Pear and decided to do a small, 2 gallon run. Check out my fast and loose recipe below and feel free to chime in with thoughts/suggestions for improvement. Apologies in advance for a lack of specifics, I realize the more info the better when asking for guidance.

Filled a 2 gallon bucket with ripe prickly pear of different variety (didn't measure weight this time around)
Cut them in half and threw them in a pot. *note* - use tongs or a glove to handle these bad boys, or you'll have a handful of cactus spines and glochids
Pulverized them with a potato masher to get the juices flowing, topped it off with some water (maybe 2 cups), and threw it on the stove
Simmered with the lid on to break down the cactus a bit more, maybe 20 minutes
Cut the heat and let cool
Strained the mash through a pillow case and used my hands to squeeze out all the juicy goodness
The result was pretty. Blood red, syrupy consistency, and quite sweet on it's own
This yielded about 1.5 gallons of prickly pear juice
Added half a gallon of water to stretch it, and maybe 3-4 cups of sugar to get the SG up to 1.070
Pitched some dry white wine yeast I had lying around, put a lid on her, and walked away
3 days later all the sugar had fermented out. No sweetness, but not sour either. SG was around 1.000, so a solid 9% abv
Ran it once through the pot still, low and slow
After cuts and blending I ended up with around 1.5 pints of very nice product. 54% abv

The shine tastes smooth and flavorful. lots of pricky pear coming through. Goes great over ice, accompanied by an orange peel.

Overall I'm very pleased with the turn out, and I'm thinking about scaling up to 5 gallons soon. My main issue was the straining method I used... The pillow case was super effective, but I think I may have PTSD from squeezing all the juice through. My hands were covered in glochids and cactus spines were poking through the fabric. Needless to say, this was annoying and painful... and in hindsight I should have gloved up for this part. Would love suggestions on how I can strain the cactus skin and seeds without a blood sacrifice! Or is this just par for the course when dealing with prickly pear?

Any constructive criticism or questions is welcome as well. Thanks for reading!