Home Distiller

Last year I managed to get 6 gallons of store bought apple juice for free and while it gave OK results it was a bit lacking, The stuff I picked and pressed had better fuller flavor and body and was just better, I cant really explain it, but from what I get from reading Jimbo's apple thread where he states he gets 1 1/3 gallon of juice from 23 pounds of apples and it takes 26-28 pounds of apples per finished bottle, I believe that comes to about 1.6 gallons of juice to one bottle of brandy. It would cost about NZ$38 (US$33) for 10 gallons and at that figure of approximately 1.6 gallons of juice per finished bottle that comes to roughly $5-$6 a bottle ( in juice cost only) which isn't bad at all really. I guess it all depends on what your time is worth, right now mine is so short it would be awfully tempting to go that route but I don't think I could find it that cheap around here so guess I will just have to pick and press.

Just picked about 5 gallons (30 pounds!) of blackberries this morning. I want to make eau de vie. I searched around the forum for recipes, haven't seen a good one.

Searching around the web for blackberry wine recipes, I see that most of these call for added sugar. I was thinking a "true" eau de vie has no sugar added - but I also want a decent yield.

Any tips/pointers/links to recipes? Time's a wasting now. These things need to go into a ferment!

My thought is to just juice them, I know a lot of people on here don't approve of my method but I take about 2-3 gallons at a time and crush them with a potato masher and heat them for a bit then strain them with a spaghetti strainer, it takes a while but works well. Another method I use from time to time is to freeze them then crush and strain or press in my apple press. I read somewhere that fermenting on the seeds makes blackberry wine excessively bitter so I have no desire to have a bitter wine but maybe it would give the eau de vie a kirsch like quality but I would be afraid of ruining something that is far too difficult to achieve in the first place. Some people say they get very little yield out of them with an eau de vie, much like raspberries but I checked my juice from last year and it had a potential alcohol of 5% (S.G. 1.04) so while yield will not be spectacular it should be acceptable and very flavorful. My thought on an Eau deVie is to just juice the berries and add a yeast like D-47, I like 1118 but it can sometimes strip a bit of flavor but with only 5% alcohol in the wash flavor shouldn't really be a problem. And that's all I would do, Juice yeast and let it ferment nice and cool and slow. That's why I like 1118 it is still active at 45F and we don't get a lot of time over 70 here where I am.

The other day my wife and I managed to get to the blueberry park again, So many of the plants have not even been picked, you could stand and pick from a single bush for an hour! We were picking with both hands just as fast as we could for the 1.5 hours or so we were there and left with about 1.25 gallons of blueberries. I also gave the apple trees some good shakes and got a five gallon bucket of apples in just a few minutes. Sunday I checked most of the apple trees I regularly pick and they aren't quite ready yet so I'm happy with what I got at the park. My apple juice goal this year is 45 gallons but since I am so busy with other things I just don't know if I will make that. I've been picking blackberries too but not to the extent I usually do, So far only a few gallons but the Oregon Evergreens are finally starting to ripen and will need picked soon and this year will need a bit of pruning back again. They are the best blackberries I have ever had and the bushes are just loaded with them. Maybe a nice Eau de Vie isn't out of the realm of possibility this year.

Just doing a little updating,
A few days ago I did my blackberry picking and juicing and just for the hell of it checked the S.G. of the juice. These particular berries are the plain old wild blackberries for our area (Himalayan) so I wasn't expecting much, but to my surprise they checked at 1.045 which is about 6%, That's about the same as some of my apples are doing and I wasn't even particular about picking only the ripest and best. I got the first (only 1) of my evergreens today and they are going to be even sweeter than previous years and much sweeter than the Himalayans, looks like the freaky long wet winter we had is paying off with the blackberries too. So I'm thinking an Eau de Vie is not out of the question this year.

In apple news I managed to overcome my fear of people long enough to ask about a couple of apple trees behind a local business and was given the OK to strip the trees bare, which is exactly what I did to one of them with my newly modified apple basket which is now light weight and extendable giving me an effective reach of close to 20 feet. From one tree I managed another 6 gallon bucket of the most beautiful bright red apples you would ever want to pick. I figure they have to be Red Delicious which is good because I feel my cider needed some sweet apples and I sorted out the best and put them aside so the wife can make some apple butter, you gotta keep the wife happy. She is already getting tired of the apple mess. I checked the apples on the other tree but they are far from ready to pick so I will bide my time and keep an eye on them for when the time is right.

Just thought I'd do an update in case anybody is still following this thread.
Last week I couldn't get to the blueberry park but managed to this week and the plants are still producing like crazy, particularly in the far northwest corner of the park and if you are willing to slip between bushes instead of just follow the easy paths everybody else uses.
Since I didn't get to that park I decided to give my newly rebuilt apple basket a try at my normal apple hunting grounds. I managed to get most of the remaining apples off the early apple tree and checked the one around the corner but it isn't ready. This spot drives me kind of nuts because I can see lots of fruit back in the thicket a bit but there is an impenetrable blackberry thicket that I am considering hacking my way through this winter so I can get that fruit next year.
Not satisfied with my take for the day, Sunday I went to the pear tree that was good to me last year but got clobbered by the same storm that knocked all the blossoms off the rest of the pears in the area. There were only a few pears at the very top and my wife wanted some pears, the new picker was able to reach all of them but that amounted to only 16 and the apples by the pear still aren't ripe so I decided to take a little walk and see if I could find something that was ripe.
I walked down a bit and spotted another tree that looked like it might be a pear that made it through the storm so I tried to fight my way through the fairly thin blackberry brambles to try to get to it with no success but then I noticed I was standing right next to a plum thicket with the most beautiful golden plums all over the place. They were very over ripe and by the time i picked as many as I could reach my arms were sticky with the juice. I managed to get about 3 gallons of plums and time began running short so I turned to leave and there right behind me and easy to get to was a huge apple tree with nice big ripe apples so loaded down it was in jeopardy of breaking it's branches. I couldn't let that happen, so I went over to it and began picking as fast as I could and in less than 3 minutes had an entire bucket full of apples to go with my plums. Since that was all the containers I had brought with me I headed home with the intention of returning next week to get as many of the rest as I can.
At home of course is where the real wok begins, washing, chopping, removing bad spots and grinding. By then it was too late to do a good pressing so I put the pulp into gallon bags, 5 gallons of apples turn into 3 gallons of ground fruit, that was placed in the freezer to be dealt with when I had time.
Then Tuesday one of the guys at work brought me 2 buckets of apples from his trees, This made me happy because the only thing better than free apples is free apples that somebody else picked. So when I got home I took the already ground apples out of the freezer and began the process of prepping the new apples, the wife has been wanting to make some apple butter so the best, ripest and sweetest apples went to her, gotta keep the wife happy, and the rest were ground and pressed yielding 7 quarts of juice. Then the big surprise, once the other apple pulp was thawed and pressed it had a considerably higher yield than I was expecting giving me 6.5 quarts from that single bucket full, almost as much as the bucket and a half of the other apples and about a quart higher than I've ever gotten from even the ripest bucket of apples. Now I need to go to the brew shop and get some other yeast because I now want to try a few different yeasts on apples before the cold weather hits and see how they turn out.

Great thread. Here in SE Georgia the unusual winter-spring-summer weather messed with my apple and pear trees. Been collecting the early fallers & ripening in cardboard boxes then storing in a freezer. Stayed busy at that for near on 3 months now and have 40 or 50 lbs collected already. About twice that amount still in trees. A friend with family near Atlanta is going to bring a truck load of apples, pears, and GRAPES down in a few weeks. Looks like it will be a Brandy Autumn this year.

scuba stiller wrote:Great thread. Here in SE Georgia the unusual winter-spring-summer weather messed with my apple and pear trees. Been collecting the early fallers & ripening in cardboard boxes then storing in a freezer. Stayed busy at that for near on 3 months now and have 40 or 50 lbs collected already. About twice that amount still in trees. A friend with family near Atlanta is going to bring a truck load of apples, pears, and GRAPES down in a few weeks. Looks like it will be a Brandy Autumn this year.

I love fruit and free fruit is my second favorite kind because free fruit means almost free booze and good booze at that. I also like brandy better than grain alcohol myself and in all actuality all-grain is probably much harder to make than brandy.

After my latest experiment I have to say I recommend freezing all apple if possible before pressing, if not before freeze and thaw after pressing and repress. What I did as an experiment is take the leftover "spent" pulp from the non frozen pressing, this was 4 gallons of pulp compressed down to 1 gallon so it had been pressed really well, and froze it for 8 hours in my deep freeze. Then I took it out and thawed it. It took a total of 24 hours to thaw because apparently apple pulp is a great insulator but when it was thawed I put that one gallon into the press and managed to press another full quart out of it. With no reduction in potential alcohol. What this means is that for every full bucket of apples, if I freeze the pulp either before or after pressing, it would seem that I can get an extra quart, which means 1 extra gallon for every 4 buckets of apples, which to me is well worth the effort since getting the apples to the pulp stage is so much work. I can even save up pressed pulp since I usually compress 3 gallons of pulp down to one and after 3 pressings can have a full press of post frozen pulp to do all over again. The only problem now is that I lost a part from my pressure cooker and had to order a new one so I've been freezing all my green beans instead of canning and they are now taking up most of the freezer.

I turned the 30lbs of blackberries into 6 gallons of wine. Ended up adding about 10 lbs sugar, so that I could get the yield up. And I am still gonna call it eau de vie. Let those who've picked more berries than me cast stones!

I used a recipe from the LBS. Mashed the berries in a fermenter, and added the sugar as simple syrup to get the SG up. Picked up some stuff at the LBS that you add that kills all the natural yeasties. Let it sit 8 hours and then pitched red wine yeast. Fermented in an open fermenter for a week, then transferred to an airlocked carboy. I tasted the product midway and it was fantastic. It's still bubbling away now, and I will run it once it stops. My plan is to pot still, and take off at about 80-100 proof if I can in order to retain flavor. I can't wait!

Bob Loblaw wrote:Picked up some stuff at the LBS that you add that kills all the natural yeasties.

I hope that wasn't sulfur dioxide.

hmmm. Looked it up. It was campden tablets, which are SO2. I looked around the forums and didn't see any warnings on this. What is the issue?

Sulfur in = sulfur out. Never done it myself because I found that out before I built my still.

http://homedistiller.org/forum/viewtopi ... 8&start=60

Never cared for compden myself even for wine, with blackberries I usually heat them when I juice them (I think this is steam juicing) which breaks everything down as well as kills off all the wild yeasts. Some people say this effects the flavor but I think sulphides effect it even more. I may do everything wrong but it works out for me and I'm the person I'm making it for.

NZChris wrote:Sulfur in = sulfur out. Never done it myself because I found that out before I built my still.

http://homedistiller.org/forum/viewtopi ... 8&start=60

Well, fwiw most threads I found mentioning campden tablets don't mention any problems with sulfur coming thru. There wasn't a lot added. And isn't copper supposed to pull out sulfur?

I'd love to hear from someone who has personal experience with any issues

Did my research in university libraries before the internet as we know it existed. Even though there was copper in my still, I never took any chances with it. Silver fish have eaten the label off my bottle of Campden tablets.

I use it in wine, but only if I intend to age it. It's disappointing to open a fresh white wine that you've gone to a lot of trouble to grow and vint and the note that hits you when you open the first bottle is eggs.

Copper reacts with sulfur producing insoluble copper monosulfide which stays behind in distillation. Don't use copper sulfate as that is killing fire with fire.

MDH wrote:Copper reacts with sulfur producing insoluble copper monosulfide which stays behind in distillation. Don't use copper sulfate as that is killing fire with fire.

This is what I meant by my copper comment. My still head and condenser are both copper. I've read SO2 is a natural byproduct of yeast fermentation. So it doesn't sound like you can avoid having it in your mash.

Copper contact will work, but it's far from ideal since only in an ideal world would every particle of vapor have perfect contact with copper. Hence why you can use soluble organic copper salts to quickly, and 100% effectively perform the same operation.

Well, the rainy season has begun here effectively signalling the end of fruit season. The blueberries are gone, the blackberries are turning bitter but a few are still ripening and even flowering. Some apples are still on the trees but most of them are done except for one that produces smallish cider apples and one that produces the sweetest apples I've ever tasted but they won't be ready for a few more weeks. The sweet apple juice is reserved to keep the wife happy. I may hit the cider tree a few more times but the wife is pretty tired of the apple mess so she won't be happy about it.
All in all it's been a good fruit season. I think I managed to get around 5 gallons of blueberries, somewhere around 3 gallons of blackberry juice and 16 gallons of apple juice which is in various stages of fermentation.
As far as blueberry Most of them are being utilized for things other than booze although I do plan on making some blueberry P.D. however after one of our more productive blueberry outings I forgot about them for a few days and by the time I remembered them they were already fermenting but not moldy. So I decided to make a nice dessert wine out of them. I threw them in a pot with a bit of water and began heating them to kill anything nasty that might be in there but since the blueberry park has been around since 1929 I figure the yeast should be pretty adapted to them anyway. After I was satisfied that anything I didn't want was dead I pressed them in my apple press then added some simple syrup and water to the batch to bring the volume up to 2 gallons and potential alcohol up to 12% and pitched some D-47 yeast. I chose D-47 because it has a maximum alcohol tolerance of 14% which makes it a bit better for a dessert wine than 1118. I use 1118 a lot because of it's tolerance for low temps but figured I had at least 2-3 months before it will be too cold for the D-47. It has been fermenting now for 5 or 6 weeks and is clear and I just racked and sweetened and topped it up to sit another month or two before bottling for Christmas. Currently I'm very pleased with it's flavor.

I also got a few gallons of Jefferson plums while scouting for apples, which was just enough to make my wife's world famous plum butter wine which at the moment is quite interesting.

Here is the exact recipe for Jefferson plum butter wine.
Ingredients:
2-3 gallons of fresh picked very ripe Jefferson plums
Sugar
yeast of choice, I used D-47
I don't recall if I used any pectic enzymes or not, I don't usually find it necessary but may have, use your own judgement here.
I do not ever use sulfites because some people, including myself, have adverse reactions to them and I have never actually had any problems as a result of not using them. Again, use your own judgement if you want to use them.

Now here is how you go about making plum butter wine.
Find a thicket of Jefferson plums. Wait until they are over ripe and splitting and falling off the trees, then pick them.
de-pit them by squishing them in your hands because they are too ripe to do it any other way and take the pits out.
Put all the plums in a big pot and squish them with a potato masher, add a little water but not much and begin heating them on medium heat until they cook down a bit. This should result in a weird looking sort of chartreuse green plum mixture that tastes sweetish but bitter. Add some sugar at this time to try to overcome the bitterness. Then decide that you don't like the flavor for preserves and move it to a crock pot to try to salvage it by making plum butter. Cook this on low in a crock pot for 24-48 hours, occasionally tasting and adding sugar to try to balance the flavor. After 48 hours it should be thick with a nice dark brown color. At this point give up on the plum butter idea and decide to try to salvage something by making it into wine.
Water down the thick brown plum goo until your potential alcohol is about 12-14%, this should bring the total volume up to around 1.5 gallons. Make sure the temperature is below 100F then pitch your yeast into this 1.5 gallons of sweet brown liquid. I used one package of D-47 yeast, but you can pretty much use any yeast you feel will work for you. Separate liquid into 2ea 1 gallon jugs leaving enough headroom for a lot of foam. Shake them up real well, airlock and let them run.
Over the next few weeks the wine will foam a lot so it needs a gentle shake twice a day to work the foam back into the must. After one month there should be lots of sediment so it's time to rack. You will lose a lot of volume with the first racking so both jugs can now be racked into a single jug, my jugs are actually imperial gallons which are closer to 5 quarts. Top this jug all the way to the top leaving only a half inch or so of headroom, if you have more than one jug full rack that into a bottle leaving as little head room as possible and let it sit and settle for another month, then rack again. At the second racking taste the wine and see if it is sweet enough, if it is top up using the extra wine in the smaller bottle, if not top up with simple syrup and let it sit another month and repeat until wine is clear and sweet enough, then bottle.
This wine is a very dark brown with the appearance of a good dark beer which could be confused by some to be heavily oxidized so I wouldn't recommend entering it in any competitions but it should be a nice dessert wine.

Now as far as apples, I tried several different yeasts this year. Last year I used strictly 1118 but this year inspired by Jimbo I thought I might experiment a bit. The earliest apples were done using 1118 which in all honesty is probably the best for distilling but I gave a few bottles of the cider I made last year away and people commented about a somewhat harsh finish, I've also read the same complaint in cider forums. So this time I did some research and tried 1118 on the earliest cider, then I tried Safale-04 which is what a lot of cider makers recommend and last I used D-47 because it seems like a good one for this purpose.
The 1118 worked like it always does, fast start, nice ferment, everything as expected.
The safale-04 was problematic and very slow starting, so slow that it began to look like it was coming down with an infection so I pitched a few packets of 1118 which got it going well but it still seems to have a bit of white stuff on the top. but seems to be doing well.
The last batch I used D-47. So far I have 7 gallons of that going. I'm actually quite pleased with it. I think it will make nice bottled cider but don't know about brandy but I guess we will see. I do plan on bottling some of the cider which was the reason for choosing D-47. So far I'm very pleased with the D-47 but as the weather cools it has a tendency to stop working well before the 1118 so if I pick and press any more apples I will use 1118.
In addition to all the hand pressed cider, a few weeks ago Safeway had apple juice on sale for $5 for 1.5 gallons so I spent $15 to buy 4.5 gallons so my son can make his own apple wine and stop drinking all my hard earned wines. In addition to this juice I also bough 5 cans of frozen concentrated apple juice to add to the bottled juice to boost the sugar level naturally. Then let him decide if he wanted to boost the potential alcohol a bit more using sugar but he decided that the 9% (S.G. 1.068) potential we got by adding the concentrate was perfect for him. On that we used 1118 because he likes his cider and wine dry.
Now I would like to do a little rundown of everything I've tried with apples this year.
This year I bought a juicer, which I have to say works real well on apples but I didn't like the results. The juicer worked so well and so fast that the juice came out almost as clear as water with little of the nice golden brown color which I assume is caused by some oxidation of the juice. The final fermented cider was much lighter than any of the rest.
Eventually I switched back to my old traditional method of grinding up apples and pressing the pulp in my little apple press. I hope to find the time over the next year to make a much larger press but that just hasn't happened yet so my method was to pick a 5 gallon bucket of apples or two or three, wash them core and chop them and removing all the bad bits, I know a lot of people don't bother with this step and just dump the apples in a grinder and press them and in the future I may start doing it that way but right now I like my cider to be worm free. After all that I grind the apples into a fine pulp in a food processor. This results in about 3 gallons of pulp from a five gallon bucket of apples. My press is only a 3 gallon press so this maxes it out, I would then load it all up in the press and press out about a gallon and a quarter of juice per 5 gallon bucket of apples.
After a while of pressing this way I decided to try freezing the spent pulp and see if I could get any more juice out of it. I have to say freezing it is a good thing but it takes 2 days to thaw for the second pressing. However the yield from the post frozen pulp is well worth the effort since it gave me an extra one to two quarts of juice per pressing with no reduction in potential alcohol.
Then I figured what the hell, why do two pressings instead of just freezing then thawing the pulp straight away, which is what I started doing. This yielded a much lighter juice than pressing right after grinding, which I find interesting but I don't taste any difference in the final product and there seems to be no difference in S.G.
As far as types of apples, I have picked or been given apples from 21 different trees one of which had at least 6 and probably 10 or more different variates. All these varieties range from super tart wild apples, traditional tart cider apples from nearly 100 year old trees to sour green apples to sweet apples that I'm pretty sure are honey crisps planted in the 60's. potential alcohol ranged from 6% (S.G. 1.045) to 7.5%(S.G. 1.057) but since I added each pressing to what was already fermenting I cant tell you what the final ABV is, it's just somewhere in between. If for some reason I add in the super sweets when they are done it will boost the total ABV quite a bit. Last year those apples yielded 8.5+% alcohol and look like they are on their way to doing the same this year but they won't be ready for picking for several more weeks and the wife will probably get most if not all of that, she also got 2 full buckets of the biggest, best, non-wormy apples to make apple butter which kept her happy for a while but now she wants me to quit playing with apples and finish remodeling the kitchen and bathroom and getting the house ready for a nice Christmas vacation. So I am going to stop getting lost in fruity goodness for a bit and let everything sit and ferment out for the next couple months until I can once again have some free time this winter to run it and see how all my hard work over the summer turns out.

cranky wrote: After my latest experiment I have to say I recommend freezing all apple if possible before pressing, if not before freeze and thaw after pressing and repress.

I agree with you cranky on the benefits of freezing. All of my apples and the "soft eating" pears have been frozen, pressed and the juice frozen. This is an on going operation as the "cooking pears" keefers (I think) are still showing up in the yard as windfallen. I collect them and store in cardboard boxes until they finish rippening and then freeze them. When I need the freezer space for more pears the frozen are thawed, pressed, and now with so much juice on hand, I'll finally ready start the first ferment this weekend. Still not sure how much brandy we'll make this year, just keep on working the fruit. Part of my rationale for stalling for time is the stillin shead has been too hot for any ferments, let alone a fruit ferment.
SS

scuba stiller wrote: Part of my rationale for stalling for time is the stillin shead has been too hot for any ferments, let alone a fruit ferment.
SS

I have the opposite problem, what I don't get done by mid November has to wait til April or May. We have been going through a warmer than average spell right now but the temps are already getting into the 40s at night so I have been rushing to get everything I can ready in time for my vacation in December when I can do something with it although I'm worried that one of my batches is turning to vinegar, in the picture it is the middle one, so I may just have to find the time to run at least a stripping run on that and the other one that is finished. A few weeks ago I managed to find time to run the mixed fruit. 1.5 run yielded a bit less than a quart of 100PR final product which spent 2 weeks in a bottle with no cap on top of the clothes dryer (my version of a poor mans ultrasonic) and is very nice but I'm not sure if I want to oak it or leave it white but it is quite nice white, you get that hint of fruit but cant quite put your finger on which fruit but that was kind of my goal. Ultimately it will be tempered to 80PR because 100 is just too strong for me.
I also picked another half bucket of apples today because I can't help myself, I just keep seeing apple trees and feel sorry for them because nobody wants their fruit and it is a shame to waste it.
Anyway, here is a picture of whats going on in my fermentors right now.

Reporting back on my Blackberry eau de vie. As I mentioned earlier, I had about 30 pounds of blackberries that I turned into six gallons of blackberry wine. Following a wine recipe from my LBS, I added about 9 lbs of sugar to get the SG up to where I could get a higher ABV. Used red wine yeast, IIRC. I let the wine ferment in a fermenter for about a week, then in a carboy with an airlock for about 4 more weeks. Checked it yesterday and the SG was 0.99 - so I ran it.

Ran it in through my 15g boiler with copper pot still head + liebig. I wanted to keep as much fruit flavor as I could - so I was running it (at least I thought) pretty hard. Distillate was coming off in a steady pencil-lead thick stream. Not broken. Steady. I pulled off about 120 oz or so. Most of in the range of 60-70% ABV.

My observations:
1) No sulfur smell or signs of sulfur. I had treated the fruit with campden tablets. The don't have any effect I can see at all on the distillate, at least when run through a copper still. So you can put your books away. My real world experience is that they're not an issue.
2) The product is not as "fruity" as I had hoped. It has a good nose, definitely a bit of fruit - but not what I was hoping for. I sampled a bit of hearts, cut down with water. Again, a bit of fruit and a nice lingering sweetness on the tongue - but not as fruit forward as I thought it might be.

I am going to let it air out for a bit, as I expect that will mellow things and let the fruit flavor/odor become more pronounced. But I also think that adding the sugar head may have resulted in a less flavorful product. I guess that is the tradeoff, because the brix score of blacberries is not so high. I think I would have ended up with maybe 30 oz of product out of all that fruit picking. Which hardly makes it seem worth it! Maybe I should have run it harder though? In my head I wanted it to come off between 40-50% ABV, which didn't seem possible as I was running the batch. I think I ran the whole thing in about the time it took for a football game. It was pretty fast.

Curious what experiences others have had with their distilled product.

Some fruit has a lot of flavor still to come over when most of the alcohol is gone. How low did you go?

Paulinka has some good posts on fruits that might answer your questions.

Well, I didn't go too deep. I ran it down to about 50%. My cooling water was getting too hot and I had distillate vapor coming out the end - so I decided to cut the run. So perhaps I should have run it deeper. I was getting lazy about the water, I admit. I'll have to compare that last jar to the earlier ones to see if there's any difference.

Right now I have about 5g of ~60% low-wines from a few birdwatchers batches that I need to re-run. I think I will be set for neutral spirit for quite a while!

Bob Loblaw wrote:Reporting back on my Blackberry eau de vie. As I mentioned earlier, I had about 30 pounds of blackberries that I turned into six gallons of blackberry wine.

Curious what experiences others have had with their distilled product.

I did something similar a while back but no compden and it turned out quite nice, after a few months it developed a mild blackberry flavor but not as strong as I'd hoped so I tried to macerate some blackberries in it ala panty dropper, Wish I hadn't done that. For some reason it resulted in a very good tasting likker but with a wicked headache the next morning. I don't think I put that much heads in it so I only assume it was from the seeds in the whole blackberries. I've done others where I tempered it with blackberry juice with no seeds and had no problems what so ever and tons of blackberry flavor. I may try that same method again but think I'm going to save the 3 gallons of blackberry juice I have from this year and see if next year I can manage to get enough to make a true blackberry Eau de Vie and see how that goes. My suggestion is let it rest a while and see what happens and then think about doing something like adding a bit of juice.

I've been doing bramble steeps for years. Never noticed a hangover, but maybe that's because we only ever have one small glass and have never been pissed on it.

NZChris wrote:I've been doing bramble steeps for years. Never noticed a hangover, but maybe that's because we only ever have one small glass and have never been pissed on it.

That's just it, it was only one glass which resulted in a light buzz, I seldom drink more than that. Maybe I just blended wrong but the same stuff white didn't have the same effect and there wasn't problem with the stuff before that which only used juice instead of whole berries. Might be I did a bad blending job (most likely) , might be the Oregon Evergreens are different than the ones in NZ and caused the problem, Might just be too strong but whatever the reason the bottles sit in a cupboard waiting to be re run and cleaned up when I get around to an all feints run or maybe in a few years it will settle down and become magical but I'm not holding my breath. This winter I'm thinking I will throw whatever fruit feints I have in the cabinet together with the wicked blackberry and see if I can tame it all down to something good.

It's summer again here in the PNW which means fruit season has arrived. Cherry season is in full swing, blueberry season has just begun and blackberry and apple seasons are just around the corner. Yesterday I picked all the cherries off my trees that the birds left me Yep 10 cherries. That may not sound like much but its 5 times the number I got last year and there are still 2 more left on one of the trees and the birds and bugs got more than their fair share in spite of the netting I put up. The trees themselves are quite young, I bought them as bare root trees 3 years ago.

Today I also picked the first of the blueberries (3) but there will be many more to follow. My blueberries are producing very well so the blueberry park should be loaded and full of big ripe berries once again in a few weeks. Maybe I will manage enough for a true blueberry brandy. Generally we only get enough to cover preserves, pies and a little wine. The blueberry dessert wine I made last year was exceptional although I bottled the first gallon a bit early and corked the second gallon because I needed the airlock which eventually resulted in the cork blowing out with enough force to hit the ceiling and ricochet around the garage striking at least 4 other things before disappearing. I still haven't found it but I think the wine is finally finished and ready to bottle.

My plum trees are in a similar position to the cherries, also bought 3 years ago but bloomed very early this year before the bees were out and about so unfortunately there are only a few plums growing. The Jefferson plums in the thicket I found last year are pretty loaded though and maybe I will be able to hack my way into the plum thicket where the purple plums are and manage to get something going plum wise.

The pears flowered like crazy but I think that may have been too early as well because once again the trees have failed to produce a single pear, on the other hand apples are doing quite well once again. I stopped on my way home the other day to check on the progress of the apples and am quite pleased, especially with the sweet pink apples. I discovered the pink apple tree around august first last year and by that time there were only a few apples left on the tree. There is another pink I know of in a public park that also produces quite early. Last year the earliest apple began producing July 15th which is about the time I plan on beginning to check the pink as well, they aren't very far from each other so collecting should produce quite a few at the same time. There is also a white apple in the plum thicket that produces even earlier but I will have to hack my way through 20+ feet of 10ft tall blackberries to get to it and I don't think I will be up to it this year.

My goal this year is to do as much true fruit brandy as I can manage. I have several gallons of blackberry juice in the freezer from last year and hope to get enough for at least a 5 gallon batch. I hope to send a bottle of it to the next S3 meeting. I am currently in negotiations with a teenager to trade one of my many telescopes for some buckets of blackberries but we will see how it goes. The sticking point is lenses(eyepieces) which I only have one set of and are quite expensive but a budding astronomer needs good lenses to see things clearly and not get frustrated. We will see how that goes or if I will need to do my own blackberry picking.

Yesterday my wife and I made our first trip of the year to the Blueberry park. We have a routine we tend to stick with when we go and yesterday was a good example of it. We left the house at 6:30 and got the the park around 7:00 maybe 7:30 since traffic was pretty light. Parking is pretty easy that time of the morning so we parked in our usual spot and found that about half the plants didn't bear fruit this year because they have pruned them back. This may actually work in my favor since they pruned the front half so people coming to the park who tend to only pick in the front half will find no berries and leave. The back half however are big and tall and loaded and look like nobody has been picking at all. It's very early in the season so there are still tons of green berries but there were enough ripe ones to keep the two of us busy right up to the point my wife stepped in a hole and hurt her knee On top of that I hurt my foot earlier in the week and it was still fairly painful to stand on. It was about 8:30 and we had a a little over a half gallon of berries and it was beginning to get pretty warm so we decided to take a break for a bit and while breaking decided we would head home. We left about 9:00 which was a mistake since it was full on rush hour and everybody else was heading the same direction as us. We should have just taken a break and gone back to picking like we usually do which would have given the traffic time to clear up. It took us a full hour and a half to get home, time that could have been better spent picking more blueberries. I hope to go again next week and get enough berries for some pies to bring to Bearriver's BBQ on the 12th. My true goal this year is to make some blueberry rakes and use those when there are mostly ripe ones so I can get enough to make a blueberry brandy. Of course my ultimate goal for all fruit is to make brandy out of it but the blueberries also make the years jelly and pies and pancakes and other stuff but I still have a gallon or two in the freezer from last year which will go towards wine and brandy this year.
Here are a few pictures of the bushes this year.

I dont know how I managed to miss this thread so long. Nice write ups and pics Cranky. Sorry about your cherry harvest. The birds are manic depressive around here. Some years they eat lots of my cherries, nets or not, other years, they seem to leave them alone, with no nets. ??

I did blueberry eau de vie once. But it wasnt a pure eau de vie. It started as blueberry wine that I needed to add sugar to to get to 12% ABV. Then the wine went undrank for a long time. Not much of a wine drinker. So I stilled it off. Its actually pretty nice for a sugar head LOL. The blueberry comes through for sure..... along with the sugar bite.

Ive turned lots of fruits into alcohol, raspberrys, cherrys, blueberries, plums, apples, pears. My favorites are cherry, apple and pear. As far as volume, apples are the easiest. I can pick 500 lbs of apples in a couple hours by climbing the tree, shaking the hell out of the branches and then boxing up the apples. Cherries and other berries are a pain in the balls, Same time investment gives less than 1/10 the fruit. Pear eau de vie is nice too, but when ripe they are mushy, so a bitch to strain and run. But worth the hard work, very pear forward. Apples are by far the easiest. grind press ferment run age done. Do about 1500 lbs a year. Im in the middle of doing cherries now, got 5gal fermenting and another half the tree to pick. Good thing all these fruits dont come ripe at once!